Category: Kev’s Blog

In time for JavaOne this week, Netbeans 5.5 beta is announced complete with Java EE 5.0 support.

In general I’ve been impressed with the Netbeans 5.0+ IDE, but from my recent experience with the 5.5. daily builds, there are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out in the Wizards before they are usable. The one that has caught my eye is the ‘JSF pages from Entities’, but it’s not very stable – throws lots of exceptions, and the generated code does not yet run on JBoss 4.0+.

My previous attempts to find a code generator that worked for me led me nowhere. One of my collegues at work mentioned Grails, a framework based on Groovy, a scripting language close to Java in syntax and runs on a JVM. Grails is ‘Groovy on Rails’, a Groovy implementation of Ruby on Rails.

Ok, now we’re talking. I had a hard time picking up Ruby On Rails because I couldn’t get my head around the Ruby syntax, but I can see the benefits on the RoR approach.

Grails gets me to a place I’m comfortable with, and a language I can work with – I can generate my CRUD application based on my Entities and then take it from there. This is looking good. So far I have generated just a small test app to see how it hangs together, and have modified some of the generated .gsp pages – this is looking very promising so far.

I have to say I am pretty excited about Grails. I have a small project for a client to build an online store, so I’m going to be investigating building it with Grails and will see how far I get. Here’s my first post about some MySQL issues, but now I’ve resolved those I’m on the way.

java.sun.com have a great article showing a side by side comparison of the Java Persistence API in EJB3.0 compared with EJB2.1 entity beans.

If you haven’t started coding with EJB3.0 yet, take a look at this article, because with the side by side comparison it really does show how much of a radical change for the better this new API is.

If you are developing an app that replies on pure JDBC as it’s data access mechanism, consider looking at the JDBC support in the Spring Framework to help you out.

The Spring JDBC support greatly simlifies JDBC development by introducing a template based approach which encapsulates the majority of the coding you normally have to do by hand with JDBC. For examples and a comparision between raw JDBC and the Spring approach, look at this article on the java.net site.