NetBeans Rocks

Well, after being a long time eclipse user I made the switch to NetBeans 6 for the Java EE 6 project.  Why?  Mainly because of built in support and glassfish. I had used JBoss and eclipse for the previous version of the project.  At that time (2005) ink was not dry on the Java EE 5 spec so I was willing to put up with some pain.  But it took JBoss so long to get to version 5 and their eclipse support was wanting too.

I decided to look at NetBeans and GlassFish when starting the Java EE 6 version of the application.  I was very pleasantly surprised to find the high level of support and integration.  Giving up eclipse was a bit hard at first but after using NetBeans for a couple of weeks I realized just how much eclipse and the JBoss tools were lacking.

 

Wow a year has gone by

Well I am red faced.  I let the opportunity slip by.  Almost 2 years ago I was back on an EJB3 project I had architected 2 years ago.  I worked like heck over the last 2 years and am now on the verge of releasing a Java EE 6 version.  So as time permits I am going to document some of the things I have learned. I’ll try to post at least once a week. Promise.

Back in the saddle again

I am back on an EJB 3 project again.  This time I am taking an application done in the early days and converting from JBoss 4.0.3SP1 to JBoss 4.2.x.GA.  There have been lots of surprises along the way.  I’ll be taking time out every now and then to talk about them.   

Long Delay

Sorry for the long delay.  I got a call from a client who needed help.  It is a short term project but it consuming most of my free time.   Now that I have finished redoing all their JSF pages I have some time to write and try things out.

This last three weeks of editing myfaces JSF pages in eclipse has been painful.  Thankfully I had myeclipseid plug in but since the project was really not structured for using myeclipse I could not use it to its full potential.  But still, it was a huge help for verifying pages before deployment.

I am doing some toy projects on the side with netbeans 5.5 beta 2 and JBoss 4.0.4GA.  I used to dislike netbeans.  I had used it off and on over the years and my contract at Sun I started with Forte, then netbeans but soon switched to eclipse because  I really needed the refactoring support.  This was 4 years ago now. At the end of my contract there Sun was pushing all their developers to use netbeans.  I found it painful to use then.  But now I back on enterprise projects and I have found eclipse to be lacking in some areas.  I think part of this may be they are hold back on really good enterprise support for the websphere group that has their own plug ins.  Whatever the case, I am finding netbeans fun right now for my personal projects.  And their Mac OS X support seems to have improved.

So stay tuned.  I discuss some of these issues in more detail in coming posts.

Netbeans and EJB 3 on JBoss 4.0.4

Well I have been trying out netbeans again. I was surprised to see I could setup and build an enterprise java bean version 3. I first setup the server options for my install of JBoss 4.0.4.GA then make a new EJB project. It looked like netbeans included every jar in the server in the project’s classpath.

I was able to create new Entity beans and session beans with the correct EJB 3 annotations. I am still trying to figure out the best way to make an entire Enterprise application with netbeans because they control the build.xml file. I have mail into a friend on the netbeans PR team. I’ll be back with what I find out.

Meanwhile, back to eclipse and I’ll see if version 3.2 breaks the JBoss plugin or maybe I’ll just use myEclipse’s latest milestone build.

Project Organization

On the project we modeled our file structure for the project on the video store example from JBoss by Norman Richards.  When we mapped this to eclipse we kept everything under one project.  This structure worked for us since we had a very small co-located team and we did everything from domain objects (entity beans) to the JSF pages.

Now I am looking at what it would take for a larger team of developers where there would be more specialization in the work members would contribute.

In coming blogs I will go over the benefits of each approach.

Hello

Welcome to my new blog. I am going to be discussing my experiences of using EJB3 on a live project over the last year. Stay tuned.