WildFly Swarm - Devoxx BE 2016 Hands on Lab

The lab will take the user through some simple use cases for using WildFly Swarm.

First step is to clone the repository containing the examples:

git clone https://github.com/heiko-braun/devoxx-hol.git

Existing Java EE Application to Migrate

JAXRS Example

Open javaee\pom.xml in your favorite IDE to load the project. These projects were brought in "as is" from https://github.com/javaee-samples/javaee7-samples.

Note	We only used a few examples to make the number of projects manageable in an IDE.

In the IDE add the following plugin definition into the root pom.xml:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.wildfly.swarm</groupId>
  <artifactId>wildfly-swarm-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2016.10.0</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
    <id>package</id>
      <goals>
        <goal>package</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

From a terminal/console navigate to the /javaee/jaxrs directory and run:

mvn wildfly-swarm:run

You will see WildFly Swarm start up and automatically detect which dependencies are needed based on the application code.

When the server is started, open a browser to: http://localhost:8080/webresources/fruit

You should see a JSON Array returned with no elements, such as [ ].

To add some elements into it we can go back to the terminal/console and run:

curl http://localhost:8080/webresources/fruit --data 'apple'
curl http://localhost:8080/webresources/fruit --data 'pear'
curl http://localhost:8080/webresources/fruit --data 'banana'

If you refresh the browser these entries we just added will be returned in the JSON Array.

Stateless EJB Example

Let’s try another example, change directory to /javaee/ejb-stateless and run:

mvn wildfly-swarm:run

Once started open http://localhost:8080/TestServletWithInterface in the browser. You will see a message about amounts deposited and withdrawn from an account.

Angular JS & JAX-RS Example

Lastly, let’s look at an example using AngularJS for the UI. Navigate to /javaee/jaxrs-angular and mvn wildfly-swarm:run it again.

Open a browser to http://localhost:8080 and there will be a ToDo based application with a few entries pre loaded.

We’ve just converted existing Java EE 7 applications to be used with WildFly Swarm by adding a single plugin definition! Pretty cool!

What if we want to package an Uber jar?

While still in /javaee/jaxrs-angular simply run:

mvn package

which runs the build and creates a -swarm.jar for the project that is the Uber jar. The Uber jar can then be run with:

java -jar target/jaxrs-angularjs-swarm.jar

Once started open a browser to http://localhost:8080 and the ToDo app will load.

We’ve now seen two different ways that a WildFly Swarm application can be executed.

Customizing

Now it’s time to look at how we can customize our use of WildFly Swarm as opposed to just adding a plugin.

Open /custom/jaxrs/pom.xml in your IDE to load the project we’re going to modify. Currently the project only has the WildFly Swarm plugin present.

To enable us to customize WildFly Swarm we need to add an explicit dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.wildfly.swarm</groupId>
  <artifactId>jaxrs</artifactId>
</dependency>

So we added the dependency but your IDE is likely complaining about a version not being set!

To save us from setting a version directly on every WildFly Swarm dependency, we can import a bom:

<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.wildfly.swarm</groupId>
      <artifactId>bom</artifactId>
      <version>2016.10.0</version>
      <scope>import</scope>
      <type>pom</type>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

That’s better, Maven and our IDE can now find the version of the WildFly Swarm dependency.

Let’s customize something!

One of the cool, and overwhelming at times, features of WildFly Swarm is being able to programmatically do everything that can be defined within standalone.xml. So what exactly do we mean by that, well we’ve create a Java API that makes onto the operations that occur as if it’s come from standalone.xml.

For instance, let’s create a custom main class that starts our application on a different port:

public class Main { 
  public static void main(String... args) throws Exception {
    Swarm swarm = new Swarm()
            .fraction(
                    UndertowFraction
                            .createDefaultFraction()
                            .httpPort(9111)
            );

    swarm.start();

    swarm.deploy();
  }
}

What we did was create a new instance of Swarm, the hook into configuring all things WildFly Swarm, and we modified the configuration of the UndertowFraction from what happens by default. If we didn’t pass a new instance to Swarm.fraction() then a default would be provided by virtue of that Maven dependency being present in the build.

To make it easier we statically create the fraction with UndertowFraction.createDefaultFraction() and then we customize it by setting the HTTP port to 9111.

So we’ve reconfigured undertow, now we start WildFly Swarm with swarm.start() and deploy the default generated deployment of our application with swarm.deploy().

Now if we mvn wildfly-swarm:run our project it will be accessible at http://localhost:9111/webresources/fruit

Note	As with the earlier use of this example by default the returned JSON Array is empty. It needs to be populated by POST calls before data is returned.

Conclusion

In this short lab we’ve seen how easy it is to convert an existing Java EE application to be used with WildFly Swarm, and how we can customize the configuration of WildFly Swarm with a custom main() class.

For further examples and documentation check out our site.