Make your application call my application, part 3rd: resource Adapters

This series of tutorials is divided into three parts, in parts 1th and 2nd, where you learned how to develop message-driven beans (MDB) and entity beans, deploy and test them in Apache Geronimo, and how to create an e-mail application and deploy it to Java a Pache Mail Enterprise Server (Apache James). In the final installment of the series, you will learn everything about the Java 2 platform,enterprise Edition Connector Architecture (JCA) resource adapter and build a link to Apache A sample adapter for the James server, which aggregates the entire application together.

Before you start

This series of tutorials is geared toward learning how to use various Java EE components-including MDB and Java 2 platform,enterprise Edition (EE) Connector Architecture (JCA) resource adapters-building an integrated Solution for Java™platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) programmer.

About this series

In this three-part series, you'll build a sample application that understands how to integrate different Java EE components to develop complex applications. This sample application demonstrates that the data for e-mail in Apache James is flowing to the Apache Geronimo Application server via a JCA resource adapter, MDB, EJB.

Part 1th of this series describes how to develop MDB, entity beans, and container-managed persistence (CMP), and how to deploy and test these components in Apache Geronimo.

The 2nd part of this series explains how to create an e-mail application (Mailet and Matcher) and deploy it in the Apache James e-mail server.

The 3rd part summarizes the entire application. You will learn to develop, deploy, and test the JCA resource adapter for the Apache James e-mail server, which will interact with James and Geronimo through an MDB.

About this tutorial

The final issue of this three-part series will detail the interaction between the different Java EE components (MDB and JCA adapters). You will learn about the JCA-based resource adapters and build a sample adapter that connects to the Apache James server.

Prerequisite

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with the basic Java, Java EE, and Java EE concepts, such as EJBS, JavaScript message Service (JMS), MDB, and Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. Do not ask you to have any JCA knowledge beforehand.

System Requirements

To complete this tutorial, you need the following tools:

Apache Geronimo--The Java EE application server provided by Apache

Apache James 2.2--Java-based simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), and network News Trans Fer Protocol (NNTP) news server

Apache Derby Database-open source, lightweight database, embedded in Geronimo, no need to install independently

Java 1.4.2 provided by Sun Microsystems

Sample source file

First download the part3.zip (see the Download section), which includes the source code, adapters, MDB, and EJB binaries for part 3rd. The following is a detailed list of the components of the Part3.zip file:

-Deploy (Po.ear, containing Mailet and Matcher)

-Lib (Tester.jar, Examples.jar, Mail-1.3.1.jar, Activation.jar)

-SRC (Resource adapters, MDB, EJB, and test client's Java files)

-Runsendemail.cmd

-Runreademail.cmd

Overview

In this section, we will explore the evolutionary history of application integration, which ultimately leads to the emergence of JCA.