Page 1 of 30
Java EE Development using Rational Application
Developer 7.5.5 and Maven
by Chuck Bridgham, IBM
Introduction
IBM® Rational® Application Developer for WebSphere® 7.5 delivers a wide range of
integrated productivity enhancing tools for building Java™ EE, Web service, Portal, and
SOA solutions. Whether you are developing applications using the new EJB 3 or JPA
annotation tools, or reviewing existing applications using static code analysis, Rational
Application Developer is an IDE that integrates tools for designing, developing, testing,
and deploying your applications, effortlessly transitioning developers through the
software lifecycle.
The Apache Maven project has been around for a while, and many users have adopted the
build system’s practices and procedures, but are unsure how to integrate with a powerful
IDE such as Rational Application Developer.
This article is going to explore the basics of the Maven projects, and how they interact
with their Rational Application Developer equivalents. We’ll explore some best practices
building a Java EE 5 application targeting WebSphere Application Server 7.0. We’ll also
cover how nested projects can be used in Rational Application Developer, and what to
watch out for using a team SCM system. We’ll briefly cover some open source projects
aimed at automating many of the steps needed to integrate build environments within an
Eclipse™-based IDE such as Rational Application Developer. Finally, we’ll show a
Maven build in action using the Rational Team Concert build engine, integrated into the
Rational Application Developer 7.5 environment.
The Maven story
Whether you’re thinking about using Maven for the first time, or have been a long time
user, the benefits of the open build framework become quickly apparent. The following
is a very brief overview of Maven; more details are available on the Apache Maven home
page. (http://maven.apache.org/)
Maven assists developers and build coordinators to unify the wide range of build
requirements and standards into one system that is flexible enough for customization
while providing a common API that can be learned once and deployed company wide.
Maven has been available since 2001, and began with the desire to remove some of the
drudgery and duplication around creating ant scripts by specifying standards on simple
project types.