Development Done Right

In my projects, I’ve always been the one who took care of infrastructure, standardization and quality assurance from the development perspective. The funny thing is that I’m no admin and no QA guy, so most of it wasn’t even my job. In this article, I’m going to list a few things that in my opinion [...]

The State of Java Build Systems

Most people eventually get it that building release artifacts using their IDEs is not the way to nirvana. Builds have to stay stable and reproducible between IDE revisions, and being able to execute them in a command line environment or especially continuous integration servers is key to agile development.
Fortunately, there are open source build tools [...]

Generating DDL Scripts from JPA Annotations with Maven

A while ago I posted an article that showed how to generate a database schema from JPA annotations. Since I didn’t get the hibernate3 maven plugin working back then I used the antrun plugin as a workaround. Thanks to the help of a reader the plugin works now, so an update is in order.

Creating a Minimal Enterprise Application with Maven

Setting up a Java EE application is no trivial task. Dependency management, building, and deployment can get pretty complex and require a thorough understanding of deployment descriptors, jars, ears and other artifacts.
In this article, I’m going to present a truly minimal maven-based setup for the JBoss Application Server (tested with jboss-4.0.5.GA), providing a solid base [...]

Using the Maven Source Plugin

When using an ordinary jar library, IDEs like Eclipse’s JDE don’t have enough information to display inline javadocs for referenced classes. You have to manually direct Eclipse to the library’s source code to take advantage of inline documentation. Maven’s source plugin provides a convenient solution to this problem. When building the library, the plugin creates [...]

Generating DDL Scripts with Maven

Java’s persistence API (JPA) makes object-relational mapping very convenient. Using Hibernate, tables and sequences are generated automatically which speeds up development significantly. However, in production systems automatic schema creation isn’t desired. In many cases you would want to tune the schema a bit, like adding an index for speeding up common access paths, renaming constraints [...]

Quick Java Project Setup Using Maven

Java projects, especially when it comes to web or EJB applications, tend to get pretty complex. Setting up such a project is a non-trivial task because of the many conventions you have to follow to make your application deployable. The maven project management tool provides a mechanism to setup a project quickly using its archetype [...]