I’ve found that one of the most productive ways of developing Java EE applications is by using NetBeans and the TomEE application server.  For those of you that haven’t used TomEE before, it’s a Java EE 6 Web Profile certified stack that sits on top of Apache Tomcat.

As TomEE is Java EE 6 web profile certified, it supports the following technologies (all via Apache products) out of the box:

• CDI
• EJB
• JPA
• JSF
• JSP
• JSTL
• JTA
• Servlet
• Javamail
• Bean Validation

If you want / need to use JMS or JAX-RS/WS, then there’s an additional distribution called TomEE+ that provides support for these features.

I prefer to use Maven for project management / builds / testing etc which integrates well with NetBeans.

Using NetBeans, you can easily create a TomEE compatible Maven project by creating a new Maven Project from Archetype within the NetBeans New Project wizard.

The “tomee-webapp-archetype” will create a basic Web Application that’s defined and ready to deploy against TomEE.

Within the generated pom.xml file, we can see the important TomEE specific aspects are the use of OpenEJB for the EE api’s

<dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.openejb</groupId>
      <artifactId>javaee-api</artifactId>
      <version>6.0-4</version>
      <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

and the use of the TomEE Maven plugin

<plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.openejb.maven</groupId>
        <artifactId>tomee-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.0.1</version>
</plugin>

Using the TomEE Maven plugin allows the project to be built and deployed to TomEE (without having to download TomEE!). This is useful for building and compiling from the command line. To get Maven to download TomEE, deploy your project to it and then start TomEE up, use the command

mvn tomee:run

Having said that, I prefer to use NetBeans to control running my projects as this provides more advanced features such as hot deployment of JSP/JSF, controlled execution of tests etc.

To run the project from within NetBeans, simply open up the pom.xml from the File | Open Project wizard in NetBeans. NetBeans is clever enough to open Maven projects which then function just like a standard NetBeans project. Select the “Run” option and NetBeans will ask which application server to run the application on. The is no direct support for TomEE, (i.e. you don’t see an Application Server of type TomEE in the NetBeans server configuration page) but since TomEE is based on Tomcat, to define a TomEE server, you just need to create a “Apache Tomcat” server and specify the server location to that of a previously downloaded TomEE instance.

That’s pretty much all that is involved in getting up and running with TomEE and NetBeans. TomEE offers a fast Java EE 6 certified stack that provides for rapid development and deployment of applications, whereas NetBeans 7.3 provides excellent tooling to support TomEE and Java EE development.