Tag: java

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.

Last week I wrote a short article about selecting a Java code generator.

So far I have not had much luck:

• I’m still disappointed with the Netbeans 5.5 daily builds (last I tried was NetBeans IDE 5.5 daily build 200605050500). This has the most promise, but is still full of bugs and I haven;t been able to get the ‘JSF pages from Entities’ generator to work or deploy successfully to JBoss4.04RC1. The annoying thing so far is when you create a new ENterprise app, if you create Entities in the EJB project, the web project cannot see the Entities and you get no-where with the wizard. If you create the Entities in your Web project then the wizard works, but the JSF pages generated are still not compatible with JBoss 4.0.4 (despite having created defects on the Netbeans site and have them supposedly resolved).
• The JAG generator gave NullPointerExceptions importing my XMI exported UML model from Poseidon CE1.6.1 UML designer, so no luch there either.

Next is to go back to Eclipse with with JBoss IDE plugin, and use the Hibernate Tools option to generate a CRUD app skeleton for their JSF/Seam Framework… I haven’t been able to work this out yet without digging into the docs, so time to install the latest versions, browse through the docs and give it another go… by the way, here’s a link for a complete walk-through using the Hibernate Tools: http://www.jboss.com/products/seam/SeamHBTools.html

Ethan Nicholas has an interesting article in his blog this week about ‘Understanding Weak References’.

I have known of weak, soft and phantom references for some time, but have never had a reason to use them. Nicholas gives a couple of good examples of how they can be used.