ArcGIS Geospatial Enterprise JavaBeans

The ArcGIS Server GeoSpatial EJBs are a suite of server-side components aimed at providing interoperability, mission-critical support, and secure infrastructure to enable customers take advantage of their existing investment in ArcGIS Server. It also enables business to interface their existing applications to other business. The out-of-the box EJBs provides the framework to build and deploy GIS-enabled J2EE applications within the Java EE Application Server container and services to meet a variety of needs using a variety of clients by exposing ArcGIS Server Object functionality.

The functionalities they provide incude… Map display and query Data access Basic geospatial operations such as buffering and distance calculation Page Layout display and query Network Analysis and modeling Geocoding. You can even execute sophisticated geoprocessing models using EJBs. With the GeoSpatial EJBs you can allow users to display and query Map documents in a coarse grained manner. Operations that took many lines of code, now take only a few.

The overall design of the ArcGIS Server EJB framework solves a few major development hurdles for you as a Java EE programmer writing Java applications for the Server. First of all, we have drastically reduced the number of steps required to get your Geospatial EJBs up and running. Customers can take advantage of ArcGIS Server Manager tool to package the EJB functionality into convenient EJB modules (enterprise archive format or .ear files) that are ready to be deployed across major application servers in point click ease.

Figure 3: Simplifying development of Geospatial EJBs

Secondly, they mask the complexity of writing code for connecting to the Server. Even after this point, your application code could get more complicated based on your application requirements. All of the specifics of connecting to and accessing the Server are handled at the time of configuration and deployment, and not needed at the time of code development.

Thirdly, if your EJB application is going to use the JCA resource adapter to properly connect to the Server in a Java EE-compliant manner, the EJBs handle the usage of the adapter for you, so you don't have to write JCA-specific code in your application.

Key Features

• Enterprise JavaBeans Support: ArcGIS GeoSpatial EJBs is built on top of EJB 2.1 standard. The EJBs are modeled as stateless session beans and support both remote and local interfaces.
• Manager Integration: Integration of Geospatial EJB application creation within ArcGIS Server Manager gives developers the ability to package GIS capabilities in point click ease. The Manager tool allows you to create and deploy secure and highly customizable EJB applications in simple point click ease.
• Out-of-the-box Geospatial EJBs: The Enterprise ADF includes a number of Geospatial EJBs to improve developer productivity-- Map, Geocode, Network Analyst, Geoprocessing. Operations that took many lines of code now take only a few with these powerful geospatial EJBs. Fewer lines of code, and more samples, streamlined codebase offer developers a much better developer and deployment experience.
• Rich SDK: The SDK includes literature, samples, developer documentation, and scenarios to help you get jump-started while writing enterprise Java applications.
• IDE integration: In addition, Enterprise ADF provides tight integration with plugins for Eclipse IDE. This plugin give developers a very rich programming experience and productivity boost with integrated help, wizards, code snippets, importable samples, and templates for building ArcGIS-based web and enterprise applications.
• Certified and production ready: Manager generated EJB applications are ready for production deployment in clustered mode across a wide variety of J2EE 1.4 certified application servers – such as BEA WebLogic, Oracle Application Server, IBM WebSphere, JBoss, and Sun.Certification against all major application servers provides developers greater degree of freedom while choosing their application server platform. Additionally, Enteprise ADF provides a resource adapter that can be plugged into any application server that supports the J2EE Connector Architecture that enables integration between J2EE platform and ArcGIS Server.
• Standards-based: Enterprise ADF is wholly based on the Sun J2EE 1.4 standard and is written entirely in the Java LanguageResource adapter conforming to the JCA specification, that can be plugged into any J2EE compliant application server and used to connect to ArcGIS Server.
• Integration with Web ADF: Enterprise ADF components can now be consumed as a resource by Web ADF style applications. This might be of particular interest to EJB developers who want to quickly expose GIS functionality in a web application, or web developers who want to take advantage of the new multisource ADF framework to plug in their own GIS systems.
• High Availability: ArcGIS Server Geospatial EJBs provides support for multi-level failover for GIS applications. EJB components can be configured to failover to multiple SOMs. Using Manager, one can generate deployable modules with clustering mode built-in and ready to deploy across production machines..