Example non-trivial JEE web service implementation?

Question

My organisation is considering switching from an in-house proprietary application server (and adhoc protocols) to a JEE5 / JEE6 framework + web services for new development, and we're trying to get our heads around how we'd do that.

We're experiencing something of a culture shock; we're comfortable with emacs/vi, command-line tools, shell scripts and calling libraries; all the documentation we encounter seems to assume we're using Eclipse, IDE plugins, ant and/or maven and some huge framework which makes it hard to even understand what code is executing. I think an example would help enormously, so my question is:

Is there a modern, non-trivial example JEE application (or real-world open source application) out there that provides a WS-I style web service interface and ideally also demonstrates using a relational database?

I've found various "hello world" applications and tutorials that create some sort of web service using a JEE framework, but never anything more complicated than a temperature conversion service!

Answer 1

I was in a similar situation a few years ago. I was a C programmer using vi and pico on Linux, and I got hired onto a J2EE project. They may be slightly dated references and there are some differences in the newer versions, but I used the books Developing Web Services with Apache Axis and J2EE 1.4: The Big Picture as great jumping off points for me and the team I was working with. I highly recommend each book. Also check out Sun/Oracle's J2EE tutorial online. Your first iteration won't be production quality code, and should be considered a throwaway from the start, but it will get you off the ground with an IDE and the J2EE framework.