I’m just starting the development of applications using Java Persistence API (JPA). In fact, the most challenging thing comes up to me at my start, the compatibility of IDE.
JPA is co-developed by the team of JavaEE 5 Specification Group, as a replacement to the heavy-weighted Entity bean. Until now, there are limited IDE that supports the development of JavaEE, especially EJB 3.0. Two of them are Sun Netbeans and Oracle JDeveloper. Both of them are free, but not open-sourced IDEs.
I personally use Eclipse as my primary development tool, thus quite familiar with the functionalities within. However, Eclipse for now just provides a plugin project named “Dali” for the development of Java Persistence. However, Dali have lots of bugs and seems suspended from Aug, 2006. That’s why it’s not a good choice to use.
Instead, in order to develop JPA easily and still use Eclipse as my major platform, I have the following methods.
- Develop JPA related things in Netbeans, including the Entity itself and the configuration of persistence.xml file
- Export those Entities and required settings to JAR file using Ant Script
- Import the JAR file and other required libraries into Eclipse
- In Eclipse, just like developing usual applications, and for the persistence part, call the methods of Entity.
This is not a very good method, since there are so many troubles in between. But at least, it helps me to do more with JPA easily
