In Relation To

The soon-to-be final JPA 2.1 specification adds standardized support for dealing with JDBC CallableStatements (stored procedure and function calls). Arun Gupta has a decent summary of the initial JPA 2.1 features, including Stored procedure support, at https://blogs.oracle.com/arungupta/entry/jpa_2_1_early_draft. Standardized here means both across providers as well as across database vendors. Pretty sweet. As much as I liked the idea of standarized support for handling callable statements, I was not overly thrilled with certain aspects of the proposed JPA StoredProcedureQuery API. My worries were mainly around how the outputs were accessed, especially when multiple results are expected. Let's first look at a simple example of a procedure returning a result:

The JPA 2 metamodel is the cornerstone of type-safe criteria queries in JPA 2. The generated classes allow you to refer to entity properties using static field references, instead of strings. (A metamodel class is the fully-qualified class name of the entity class it matches followed by an underscore (_)).

As I'm sure you've all seen, Java EE 6 has gone final. You can now download the Final Release of the Contexts and Dependency Injection, Bean Validation, Java Persistence API 2 and Java Servlet 3 specifications from jcp.org, and read the linked javadoc for the entire platform. It's also a good chance to check out the Java API for RESTful Web Services specification, which now includes CDI integration, if you havn't already.

Now that Bean Validation is officially part of Java EE 6 and that Java EE6 is officially voted YES, let's see how Bean Validation integrates with the rest of the eco system.

IntelliJ now has support for the new JPA 2.0 typesafe query facility I've been blogging about. It's very important that this stuff works smoothly with tooling, so it's great to see that the tooling vendors are on this early.

Haha, just stumbled across this. It's funny to see, a whole three years after the end of the Persistence Wars, and in the face of the incredible success of JPA in almost every corner of Java development, that the conspiracy theorists are still out there, darkly hinting that commercial organisations like Oracle, IBM, RedHat ... have their own vested interest in RDBMS technologies, or in selling application servers.

Linda has written up the new typesafe query API. I previously blogged the reasoning behind this stuff here and here.

What, you didn't think it was possible? Of course it is! Although the Seam development team encourages you to use Hibernate as the JPA provider, Seam is capable of working with any JPA provider. This entry will show you how.

There's been plenty of discussion in the JPA group about my typesafe criteria proposal. My new favorite feature of the Java language is javax.annotation.Processor. Java 6 annotation processors are derived from the APT tool that existed in JDK 5, but are built into javac. Really, the name annotation processor is misleading, since this feature is only incidentally related to annotations. The Processor is really a fairly general purpose compiler plugin. If, like me, you've never been a fan of code generation, now is the time to reconsider. A Java 6 Processor can: