A new project was released at our BOSS pages this summer. It's a concept of using an Eclipse plugin to specify Automated Acceptance tests and running these.

A presentation will be given at the OOPSLA 2005 conference in October.

Take a look here for information or to try it out:
http://boss.bekk.no/boss/autat/

Takashi Okamoto has released a project called MiddlegenIDE, which is a plugin to Eclipse making it easier to setup and use Middlegen to reverse engineer code from an existing database.

Check out the website for more information:
http://ultimania.org/middlegenide/

We're looking into including the MiddlegenIDE project into the sourceforge Middlegen project. This is looking to be a real cool tool for Eclipse :)

I've just released a small sample application using the new EJB3 plugin for Middlegen (in cvs) to generate and test some EJB3 entity beans on JBoss4 (EJB3 Preview version).

To download go here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36044&package_id=136741&release_id=285881

For info on the EJB 3.0 Preview version of JBoss4, go here:
http://www.jboss.org/products/ejb3

I was amazed at how easy it was to develop and deploy the beans on the server. The whole sample took about 2 hours to build and assemble. The Middlegen plugin also seems to generate compliant EJB3 beans. Happy happy :)

Been setting up hsqldb to use for development in a Spring/Hibernate/WebWork2 environment. What we want is to use schemaexport, middlegen, dbunit etc. to use a generated hsqldb stored in files under the target/ directory. The web app should get a separate copy of the database included in the war file.

We solved the problem as follows (with 'templatedb' sample db):

SchemaExport and other goals use the database with a file url:
...
hibernate.connection.url=jdbc:hsqldb:target/hsqldb/templatedb
...

This way we get the database generated under the target/hsqldb directory.

Added the following goals to maven.xml, to build a jar file from the hsqldb files:

<!-- add hsqldb jar to war file -->
<postGoal name="war:webapp">
   <attainGoal name="hsqldbjar"/>
</postGoal>
<!-- goal to create hsqldb jar file -->
<goal name="hsqldbjar">
   <jar
      destfile="${maven.build.dir}/${pom.artifactId}/WEB-INF/lib/${pom.artifactId}db.jar"
      basedir="${maven.build.dir}"
      includes="hsqldb/**"/>
</goal>

This way the Spring application can use the database url with the new res: protocol:

jdbc:hsqldb:res:/hsqldb/templatedb

This is also superb for integration test cases. The database is cleaned out automatically for every testrun :)

I started looking into the new annotations in JDK1.5. The reason was some EJB3 code I was trying to write. The great thing about CMP in EJB3 is the whole POJO thing (as seems to be the most important thing in all kinds of projects these days). Now, what bothered me was this. I've been a big fan of XDoclet for a long time, and thought that annotations would be the perfect match for my CMP3 beans. Thus having code like this:

import javax.ejb.Entity;

@Entity
public class FooBar {
}

The @Entity requires me to import javax.ejb.Entity to compile with 1.5. Is this then still a POJO? I guess you could say something like this:

@javax.ejb.Entity
public class FooBar {
}

But is that any better? Hmm.. Would I really want to expose an object to my presentation layer that has dependencies on javax.ejb? How about remote clients? *boggle* Maybe this is not really an issue, have to look into it some more.

We just released a new version of Middlegen. The project has been lying inactive for a while, so we decided to make a release just to get the latest cvs changes out. Check out Middlegen site here:
http://boss.bekk.no/boss/middlegen

Sourceforge project page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/middlegen/

TheServerSide note with comments:
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=29232

We have 2 new developers on the team, so I'm hoping we can get some more activity on the releases. It's not really alot of work needed to make this a really useful tool.

Problems I'd like to address in the next release (2.2):

- More userfriendly:
* Better GUI.
* More default options.
* Easier to understand examples.
* Maven plugin (which is already out).

- Better control of code/bugs:
* Add more unit tests.
* Refactor much code.
* Remove unused code.
* Catch up with old bug reports.

- Improve build process:
* Set up Maven to use reactor for core, plugins and maven-plugin as subprojects.
* Simplify the build, use more built in Maven options instead of custom goals in maven.xml.

- Documentation/web site:
* Better, smaller and more to-the-point documentation.
* Complete documentation for all plugins.
* Documented examples and how-to's for all common cases of use.

Just released an initial versjon of a Maven plugin for Middlegen. It's been 80% finished in the cvs repository for ages, thought it was time to get it out.

With this, Middlegen has become considerably easier to configure and use. No more editing of gigantic example Ant build files from hell, just adjust your maven.middlegen properties and run.

Next step will be to provide examples of how to integrate with complete Maven build, utilizing hbm2java, XDoclet and other tools.

For information about how to test/run, go here:
http://boss.bekk.no/boss/middlegen-maven

I'll be speaking about Hibernate development at this years JavaZone conference. It's the biggest Java conference in Norway, for sure worth a visit if you're in Oslo in 15th september.

I added a report for FindBugs in our Maven build. It seems to find quite a few issues not detected by Checkstyle, PMD and Simian.

FindBugs is much more targeted towards finding potensial bugs in your code. They use static analysis to inspect the Java bytecode. The list of things being checked is quite long, and growing:

http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/bugDescriptions.html

I first started looking at it after an excellent presentation (TS-1847) by William Pugh and David Hovemeyer at JavaOne this year.

I just made a small review of "Hibernate - Developer's Notebook" from O Reilly. It's posted on java.no (in Norwegian):

Hibernate - Developer's Notebook (java.no)

In short I like the way the book is written, as a tutorial with small examples. It's very quickly read, and should be perfect for anyone looking to get an introduction or overview of Hibernate.

I'm going to talk about JavaOne 2004 news at the Norwegian Java User Group on thursday. My topics are EJB3.0 and Groovy, check out the program here. See you there :)

XRadar seems to be an interesting code analysis tool. It combines tools like JDepend, PMD and Checkstyle to build one big project report. It's different from Maven, as it will actually combine data from the different tools to come up with a combined project analysis. Reports are generated in HTML/SVG, to allow dynamic images to display package dependencies etc.

It's quite a new project, but shows potential to becoming a very useful tool. Project is hosted on sourceforge, started by people from the Norwegian tele company Telenor:

XRadar - sourceforge

A Maven plugin would be useful, right now it runs only with Ant. The really cool thing about XRadar is that it can show development over time (different "releases") as in this example. As Maven already has a notion of project versions, it would be very well suited to run something like this.