Beehive Controls are a JavaBean resource abstraction layer for enterprise Java applications. The source artifacts for Controls are simply .java files that can be built along with an enterprise Java module / project or as part of a standalone JAR file. This document describes how to build Controls in each of these project types.
Because Controls use Java annotations as a metadata model, Controls require the annotation processing features available in J2SE 5.0. As such, a special Ant build macro is used to process annotations and produce any build-time configuration artifacts (such as XML files and deployment descriptors) and binary class files. The API for the Controls annotation processor is described here. This build macro can be used to compile Control sources for a project. It can be used in an Ant build file as:
This will build the Control sources from src/ into classes/ and perform code generation of
Control beans into tmp/ using the classpath project.classpath. The resulting .class files
can then be used in your Java projects just as any other .class files.
It is often useful to build Beehive Controls into a standalone JAR that can be copied into or shared among many
Java projects. This can be done by first building the controls and then JAR-ing them into a standard .jar
file. The Controls runtime also provides an Ant
task that
is used to perform additional processing for JARs that contain Controls. The Control JAR task can be used like this
example:
The <coontrol-jar> task also merges any .manifest files that were generated while
processing control annotations. Use of this Ant task is not required, but it should be used any time Control
manifest attributes need to be merted into a META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file.
Controls can also be used in existing Java projects by adding both the <build-controls> call to
build Control sources. Optionally, the <control-jar> can be used to build the result into a
JAR file; while this is best practice, it is not required. If Beehive Controls are added to existing Java
projects, take care to resolve source file dependencies correctly. Because Controls perform code generation
of Control Bean classes, clients of Control Bean classes need to be compiled after Controls
have been built.
In order to correctly add a Controls project to source control, several resources need to be checked in. Both required and optional resources are listed in the table below:
| Name | JAR file | Version | Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beehive Controls | beehive-controls.jar | distribution | Yes |
| Beehive EJB Control | beehive-ejb-control.jar | distribution | Yes; if using EJB control functionality |
| Beehive JDBC Control | beehive-jdbc-control.jar | distribution | Yes; if using JDBC control functionality |
| Beehive JMS Control | beehive-jms-control.jar | distribution | Yes; if using JMS control functionality |
| Commons Codec | commons-codec-1.3.jar | distribution | Yes |
| Jakarta Velocity-dep | velocity-dep-1.4.jar | distribution | Yes; required at build time |
The Velocity JARs are used by Controls for code-generation and do not need to be committed to SCM if they are referenced from a Beehive distribution. They are not required at runtime. The system control JARs are needed only if they are used in an application.