As I was preparing for my Devoxx presentation next Monday, I decided to look at the somewhat harder way of integrating a JPA based business tier into a JavaServer Faces web tier. The easy way – when using the ADF 11g framework in JDeveloper 11g is creating a Data Control for the Session Facade Bean. The Web Application can create data bindings for entities, entity collections and operations exposed in the Session Facade Bean that completely hide the injection or lookup details from the web tier developer. It’s the ADF responsibility to find the session bean and manage references to it.

However, if you do not use ADF, you need to establish the link between the Web Application and the JPA Business Service yourself.

The JEE 5 way of achieving this consists of a few simple steps – on top of the JPA entity definitions: (more…)