Are you being Web serviced?: Not just another pretty WS-* standard

In NetBeans IDE 6.7, when you create a JAX-WS client, the IDE automatically creates a local copy of the WSDL and any other WSDL or schema that the WSDL references. This improves performance, because the client does not have to look up these resources on the internet. It also improves portability, since the original WSDL file and its references do not have to be available for the client to run.[Read More]

Well, the last problem with RESTful client stubs was fixed in jMaki plugin 1.8.1.1. Now however a new problem has been exposed. See Issue 150367. The change to Jersey 1.0 caused a regression in the client stub generator. This was fixed but did not make it into 6.5 release. There's a set of updates, which internally we call Patch 2, due to go out no later than mid-February. The fix for this problem will be in that set of updates. In the meantime, if you want to try out the Creating and Consuming RESTful Web Service jMaki Components tutorial, use the following sample projects instead of the projects you make in the tutorial:
http://wiki.netbeans.org/attach/RESTRemoting/CustomerDB.zip
http://wiki.netbeans.org/attach/RESTRemoting/CustomerApp.zip
http://wiki.netbeans.org/attach/RestJMakiComponents/CustomerJMakiApp.zip EDIT: As soon as I write this post, Patch 2 is released! So the problem is over.

If you try to test a RESTful client stub created in a NetBeans Web Application with the jMaki framework, as described in Creating and Consuming RESTful Web Service jMaki Components, right now it will not work. This is because the code generator uses dojo 0.4.3, which was removed from the latest jMaki plugin, version 1.8.1. I have been informed that dojo 0.4.3 will be back in jMaki by the end of this week. For a longer term solution, Ayub Khan is working on changing the RESTful client widget to use dojo 1.0.x. See NetBeans issue 154158 for more details.

In the 0.9 version of Jersey supported in development builds of NetBeans IDE, the old annotations @ProduceMime and @ConsumeMime have been replaced with @Produces and @Consumes, respectively. These new annotations are not backward compatible! If you want to use any RESTful services created according to an earlier Jersey version with Jersey 0.9, you have to change the annotations. The new annotations are also used in the upcoming official JAX-RS 1.0, of course.

Facelets support is on the trunk for NetBeans 6.5. If you install NetBeans 6.5 Beta, you can install Facelets support from the Update Center. "On the trunk" means there should be no more implementation dependency problems, which caused so many problems for the 6.1 Facelets plugin. If you would like to try out Facelets support in NetBeans 6.5, please see the 6.5 rewrite of the Quickstart tutorial.

I recently created a PHP project in NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta based on the repository version of Mediawiki. To begin with, I looked up the Mediawiki wiki page on their Subversion repository. In my IDE, I installed both the Subversion plugin and the Subversion 1.5 for Windows client, available from the Plugins manager (Tools > Plugins). Then I went to Versioning > Subversion > Checkout and entered the URL.

Because I am not a Mediawiki developer, I left the username and password fields blank. If I had developer privileges, I would have entered my authorization credentials so I could later commit changes back to the Mediawiki repository. In the next panel of the checkout wizard, the IDE automatically filled out the Repository Folder field with the path to the phase3 folder. I accepted this default. Then in the local folder field, I specified the path to the web folder for my Xampp installation. This meant that the Apache server in my Xampp could immediately expose my checked out Mediawiki repository. I left all other fields and check boxes blank, which is the default setting.

When I clicked Finish, the IDE checked out the Mediawiki phase3 SVN repository correctly to my Xampp web folder, with the path G:/xampp/htdocs/phase3.

Next I completed the Mediawiki installation procedure as described in the Mediawiki installation guide:

1. Prepare the directories.
2. Create a database.
3. Run the installation script.

Now I wanted to create a NetBeans project with this repository. I opened the New Project wizard and selected PHP Application with Existing Sources.

In the Name and Location panel, I browsed to the G:/xampp/htdocs/phase3 folder. I then selected "Put NetBeans metadata into a separate directory" This is so that no NetBeans metadata would be committed back to the Subversion repository. (I had no check in privileges in any case but wanted to test the feature.) I created a "mediawiki" folder in my NetBeansProjects directory for this purpose. I left all other fields at their default settings.

In the Run Configuration panel, I chose to run the project as a local web site, on my Xampp Apache server. I could instead have chosen to run the project on a remote FTP server or as a command-line script, as described in the Setting Up a PHP Project tutorial. Because I had already checked out the Mediawiki repository to my web folder, I did not need to copy source files to that location. So I left all fields at their default settings.

That was it! When I clicked Finish, the IDE created a PHP project out of the checked out Mediawiki repository. It took about 30 seconds to index all the files. From then on, I could use the IDE's PHP editing features to work on the project and its versioning features to update and commit my changes.

I have gone through the Official Zend Framework Quick Start on a development build of NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta. In this blog post I describe my experience in setting up the environment for Zend on NetBeans and the lessons I learned.[Read More]

Two users have reported that neither of the Facelets support nbm files (for FCS and multilingual versions) will install to NetBeans 6.1. I have reproduced this problem. The plugins fail to install, returning an error that a necessary JSP parser module is missing.

The problem appears to be that Patch 2 replaced the JSP parser with a new version, and the nbm files are set up to use the old version. Until a new version of the nbm is created, I'm afraid you need to have an installation of NetBeans IDE 6.1 without updates in order to use Facelets support.

I've just been reading this rather interesting post on WSDL and WADL via DZone. When I got to the all-too-brief discussion of WADL at the end, I realized something: after 6 years documenting web service related stuff, I still don't really know what's going on in a WSDL document. But when I look at WADL, it seems clear as day. Is this just my naive social-science-major tech writer POV, or do WS developers feel the same way?

In NetBeans 6.5, in a single wizard you can create entity classes from a database and create RESTful web services from those entity classes. You used to run two wizards to do this.[Read More]

If you want to use Facelets in NetBeans projects, you can now download a ZIP of the NBMs instead of checking out the project and building the NBMs yourself. In honor of this fact, I've updated the Introduction to Facelets tutorial that was written for 5.5. The new version is available here

I've recently taken on the responsibility for documenting Facelets and Seam support in NetBeans IDE. The 6.1 plugins have not been tested yet and so are not available from the plugin center, but I was able to build them and run the 5.5 tutorial with only minor changes. If you would like to try this for yourself:

1. Go to David Salter's blog post and follow his instructions for checking out and building 6.1 Facelets and Seam support plugins.
2. Run the Introduction to Facelets tutorial.
Let me know how it goes!

Jersey REST API 0.7 contains support for the Spring framework. This post shows how to use NetBeans IDE 6.1 with REST 0.7 to create a web application where a Spring-aware servlet is exposed through both a singleton and a per-request RESTful service. [Read More]

It's possible to perform WS-I validation of both WSDL files and SOAP messages using the soapUI plugin, available from the Update Center for NetBeans 6.1 Beta and 6.1 RC 1. soapUI is a leading tool for testig web services, developed by eviware. It's free, open-source software, with a vast feature set that includes Functional and Load Testing for Web Services, Web Services Simulation and Web Service Monitoring. In order to use the soapUI plugin for WS-I validation, you need to download and set up the Interoperability Testing Tool:

1. Download the Java version of the Interoperability Testing Tool from the WS-I.org Deliverables page.
2. Unzip the tool into the location of your choice.
3. Create a WSI_HOME environment variable set to the location of the unzipped Interoperability Testing Tool.
4. Open the IDE and navigate to Tools > soapUI > Preferences. Open the WS-I Settings tab and, in the Tool Location field, enter the location of the downloaded and unzipped wsi-test-tools folder. Select other options according to your preferences and click OK.
   

To validate WSDL files, right-click the binding node in the Web Service Tests node and select Check WS-I Compliance.

To validate SOAP messages, first monitor a SOAP request and response, as follows:

1. Find the binding node in the Web Service Tests node and expand it to show the requests.
2. Right-click a request and open the Request Editor, described in soapUI documentation.
3. In the Request Editor, send a request and wait for the response.
4. Right-click in the response window and select Check WS-I Compliance.
   

Each WS-I report opens in its own tab. The report is saved automatically if you set a location to save reports in the soapUI preferences. You can also save the report manually by clicking the Save icon above the body of the report.

You can see the test configuration used to generate the test report in the Config tab. SOAP message test reports also have a Log tab, which is an XML log of the request and response SOAP exchange.

Those of you with an interest in NetBeans Axis2 support will be glad to hear that the Axis2 plugin is available again from the Update Center. Not that I've seen it there--I installed the latest "All" bundle of 6.1 development, and Axis2 support was already present. You'll also be glad to hear that libraries in the NetBeans project are now copied to the Lib folder of the AAR file. Milan is hoping to change the Axis2 feature to support remote server deployment. The way he'd like to do it would simplify Axis2 support in general. However, we don't know if this will be done in time for the release... REST 0.6 and SOAP UI are also now supported. More about them later, after I've had a chance to investigate further.