Project 1a: Overview of Project and First Step

Due to time constraints, I'm scaling down the project a little bit. Here is an overview of the site, and a very simple first step. Recall that from now on the projects are in groups of two, so if you haven't found a partner yet please do so.

Overview

The project will eventually be a distributed Internet gambling site. We're not using real money, so it all should be legal … An important goal is to make use of the enterprise-level technologies we have

• Users log on and can examine a catalog of upcoming “events”
• A registered user can place a bet on any event, at odds computed using the bets previously placed on the event.
• When an event happens, winners are paid (and losers charged) according to the outcome of the event.
• The site will be implemented using J2EE EJBs with a MS SQL Server backend. In some places I will ask you to use the bean-managed versions of some services rather than container-managed ones, to get a better feel for what is actually going on under the covers.
• The payments will be managed by a simplified “bank” Web Service. We will provide the WSDL description and a simple implementation; your site will be a client of this service.
• The descriptions and outcomes of events will be provided by a collection of “event servers”, also implemented as Web Services described in WSDL. Your site will dynamically locate instances of the event service using UDDI, and accept bets on the events described by the event servers.
• If there is time, you may be asked to implement an event service of your own, and we can test interoperability of the services.

First Step

As we've said above, a major goal of the project is to use some “industrial-strength” technology: J2EE and Web Services.

Way back in Project 0 you got Servlets and SQL Server and JDBC working together. The next step is J2EE / EJBs.

You should set up a website that

• Displays a form with two text input fields and a “submit” button
• When the user submits the form, the result prints the smaller of the two inputs (according to ordinary Java string comparison).

  This is really trivial, but

• The computation should be done in a Stateless Session EJB.

Aha! The content here is to make sure the J2EE support works.

You have documentation starting points from Project 0. A really delightful resource that isn't mentioned there is the JBoss Wiki.

What to Submit

Create a .zip archive called proj1a.zip containing the following:

• the source files of your EJB and deployment descriptors
• screen shots of your form page and a query result

Submit the zip file to CMS by the due date.

The due date is not a big deal – we are going to look at these, but not grade them, and I'll set CMS to accept submissions forever. Please do submit this, though, even though it doesn't count for much.