JBossAS7 and Primefaces on OpenShift

This weekend I began experimenting with OpenShift, the JBoss platform as a service (PaaS) available at https://openshift.redhat.com/app/.  I run from Windows so a Cygwin and Ruby install is required to get started.  The installation of cygwin and required modules took me about 1 hour to complete.  After that, I was up and running on OpenShift in a jiffy.   There's a good blog on using CDI/Weld on Openshift at https://www.redhat.com/openshift/blogs/seeing-cdi-working-in-openshift.

In order to get Primefaces to deploy correctly on JBossAS7 I had to upgrade to primefaces 3.0.M2.  Then there are a few markup differences between 3x and 2.2 that I need to resolve.  For instance, the theme selector needed changed in order to get any pages to work.  Also, the gmapInfo panel has some difference requirements, so I have disabled it for now.  Lastly, the dataTable instant selection is different.  It used to have a onrowselectlistener attribute, but now wants a nested p:ajax tag.  I haven't figured out how to get those to work yet either.

You can see the current JSF/Primefaces/Weld/CDI/JPA application at http://cabins-basinc.rhcloud.com/primetest/cabins/search.jsf

Using JAXRS and CDI

The following helped me out a lot when setting up jaxrs over existing managed beans.

http://download.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/gkncy.html

Essentially the managed bean is now stateless ejb with jaxrs annotation:

@Stateless
@Named
@Path(value = "/cabins")

the method is also annotated:

@GET
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
@Path(value = "/list")

The entity is annotated so it can be marshalled:

@XmlRootElement
public class Cabin extends AbstractEntity {

And a JaxApplication loader class was added:

package com.examples.service;

import javax.ws.rs.ApplicationPath;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Application;

@ApplicationPath("/rest")
public class JaxApplicationPath extends Application {
}

With these things in place I can reuse the CabinSearchBean from the web page site as a bean for jaxrs (json or xml) and access via Android.