Setting Up a Development Environment

1 Setting Up a Development Environment

This chapter gives guidelines for setting up an application development environment in the Oracle GlassFish Server. Setting up an environment for creating, assembling, deploying, and debugging your code involves installing the mainstream version of the GlassFish Server and making use of development tools. In addition, sample applications are available.

The following topics are addressed here:

Installing and Preparing the Server for Development
High Availability Features
Development Tools
Sample Applications

Installing and Preparing the Server for Development

For more information about GlassFish Server installation, see the GlassFish Server Open Source Edition Installation Guide.

The following components are included in the full installation.

JDK
GlassFish Server core
- Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 8
- Java EE 8 compliant application server
- Administration Console
- asadmin utility
- Other development and deployment tools
- Open Message Queue software
- Apache Derby database
- Load balancer plug-ins for web servers

The NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) bundles the GlassFish edition of the GlassFish Server, so information about this IDE is provided as well.

After you have installed GlassFish Server, you can further optimize the server for development in these ways:

Locate utility classes and libraries so they can be accessed by the proper class loaders. For more information, see Using the Common Class Loader.
Set up debugging. For more information, see Debugging Applications.
Configure the Virtual Machine for the Java platform (JVM software). For more information, see "Administering the Virtual Machine for the Java Platform" in GlassFish Server Open Source Edition Administration Guide.

High Availability Features

High availability features such as load balancing and session failover are discussed in detail in the GlassFish Server Open Source Edition High Availability Administration Guide. This book describes the following features in the following sections:

For information about HTTP session persistence, see Distributed Sessions and Persistence.
For information about checkpointing of the stateful session bean state, see Stateful Session Bean Failover.
For information about failover and load balancing for Java clients, see Developing Java Clients.
For information about load balancing for message-driven beans, see Load-Balanced Message Inflow.

Development Tools

The following general tools are provided with the GlassFish Server:

The asadmin Command
The Administration Console

The following development tools are provided with the GlassFish Server or downloadable from Oracle:

The Migration Tool
The NetBeans IDE

The following third-party tools might also be useful:

Debugging Tools
Profiling Tools

The `asadmin` Command

The asadmin command allows you to configure a local or remote server and perform both administrative and development tasks at the command line. For general information about asadmin, see the GlassFish Server Open Source Edition Reference Manual.

The asadmin command is located in the as-install`/bin` directory. Type asadmin help for a list of subcommands.

The Administration Console

The Administration Console lets you configure the server and perform both administrative and development tasks using a web browser. For general information about the Administration Console, click the Help button in the Administration Console. This displays the GlassFish Server online help.

To access the Administration Console, type http://`host:4848` in your browser. The host is the name of the machine on which the GlassFish Server is running. By default, the host is localhost. For example:

http://localhost:4848

The Migration Tool

The Migration Tool converts and reassembles Java EE applications and modules developed on other application servers. This tool also generates a report listing how many files are successfully and unsuccessfully migrated, with reasons for migration failure. For more information and to download the Migration Tool, see http://java.sun.com/j2ee/tools/migration/index.html.

The NetBeans IDE

The NetBeans IDE allows you to create, assemble, and debug code from a single, easy-to-use interface. The GlassFish edition of the GlassFish Server is bundled with the NetBeans 6.1 IDE. To download the NetBeans IDE, see http://www.netbeans.org. This site also provides documentation on how to use the NetBeans IDE with the bundled GlassFish edition of the GlassFish Server.

You can also use the GlassFish Server with the Java Studio Enterprise software, which is built on the NetBeans IDE. For more information, see http://developers.sun.com/jsenterprise/.

Debugging Tools

You can use several debugging tools with the GlassFish Server. For more information, see Debugging Applications.

Profiling Tools

You can use several profilers with the GlassFish Server. For more information, see Profiling Tools.

Sample Applications

Sample applications that you can examine and deploy to the GlassFish Server are included as part of the Java EE 8 SDK bundle. The samples are also available from https://github.com/javaee/glassfish-samples.

Most GlassFish Server samples have the following directory structure:

The docs directory contains instructions for how to use the sample.
The pom.xml file defines Maven targets for the sample.
The src/ directory contains source code for the sample.