Often in the life of developer’s life there is a scenario where using a relational database tends to get complicated or sometimes even slow – especially when there are fragments with multiple relationships or multiple connections present. This often leads to complex database queries or desperate software engineers trying to handle those problems with their ORM framework.

A possible solution might be to switch from a relational database to a graph database – and – neo4j is our tool of choice here. In the following tutorial we’re going to implement several examples to demonstrate the strengths of a graph database .. from a route planner to a social graph.

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Today we’re going to take a look at the Maven Embedded GlassFish Plugin and how it allows us quick creation of GlassFish server instances in no time and Java EE 6 application deployment.

With a few lines of configuration in your Maven’s pom.xml we’ve got a running GlassFish instance and are able to  redeploy our application fast by pressing enter in our console.

In the following tutorial we’re going to build a Java EE 6 Web Application with a stateless session bean and a web servlet and finally deploy – and redeploy the application using the Maven GlassFish Plugin.

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Using the contract-first approach to define a web service offers some advantages in contrast to the code-first approach.

In the following tutorial we’re going to take a look at some details of this approach and we’re going to implement a real SOAP service using JAX-WS, Maven and the Eclipse IDE.

Finally we’re going to run our service implementation on an embedded Jetty instance and we’re going to take a look at soapUI and how to test our service using this neat tool.

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Aspect oriented programming and the definition of cross-cutting-concerns is made easy in Java EE 6 using interceptors.

In the following tutorial we’re going to take a look at the different possibilities to apply interceptors to your EJBs at class or method level and how to setup a GlassFish instance to run the examples.

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Portlets are a common technology to create plug&play components for modern web applications and are specified by the Java Community Process in several specification requests.

In the following tutorial we’re going to learn how to create custom portlets and how to deploy and embed them in Liferay, the popular open-source enterprise portal.

In addition we’re taking a look at inter-portlet-communication and how to create portlets using annotations.

Finally we’re building a portlet-state-aware Java-Server-Faces portlet using the  jsf-portlet-bridge mechanism.

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