Java questions which don't deserve their own thread, yet.

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8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

We're going to move to Java for our web development here at the office and I've just finished taking a boatload of Java courses over the past two months. My head is spinning.

We're on Oracle for the backend and using JDeveloper as our IDE. What I can't decide on is the multitude of frameworks both for the model and view parts of our work.

For the front end I like JSF but right now it seems to involve a lot of "magic" and I'm not sure how flexible it'll be. We do some odd things in our web app right now because the data we need to show is complex. Struts looks neat but everyone seems to think its going by the wayside. Oracle ADF on JSF looks like ASP.

On the back end I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the difference is between TopLink and EJB 3.0, aside from a better GUI in JDeveloper for the former. Oracle BC looks neat but again gives me that unsettling feeling that we'd be locking into the Oracle game for another decade.

I'm really stuck here picking out the best. For some history, our web applications were all developed by myself using Oracle PL/SQL. Its a procedural language using packages compiled into the DB and its required me to hand build pretty much everything from scratch, including a sort of homebrew MVC framework. I feel like some sort of old timey watch maker compared to the massive amount of tools that JavaEE is offering.

Any ideas?

# ¿ Mar 3, 2009 06:31

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 15:44

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

Thank you for the feedback. Assuming that I'd have to stick with JDeveloper and lie close to the warm bosom of Oracle approved technologies, which would you choose for the view: JSF or Struts+JSP?

# ¿ Mar 4, 2009 05:45

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

Does anyone here have any experience with the various persistence APIs? I'm trying to decide which ones to evaluate right now and its a maze of wierdness when it comes to who owns what and which is a standard or not.

From what I can gather Oracle bought TOP and made Toplink. Later a cut down version of Toplink was combined with some Hibernate know how to create the JPA in EJB3. Then Oracle open sourced Toplink and it became Eclipselink which is going to be JPA in JavaEE6. Then there is Hibernate just hanging out doing its thing.

We're looking at evaluating EJB3, Toplink/Eclipselink and Hibernate right now. Any others anyone can add the list? Is it worthless to look at the JPA in EJB3 with Eclipselink being the standard for JavaEE6?

# ¿ Mar 12, 2009 12:09

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

F'Nog posted:

The JPA is just the set of interfaces that live in the runtime and all the providers your listed implement them. I've only every used Hibernate, there isn't anything it doesn't do that I've needed. It just plops in and works. It's also got a pretty big userbase for reference material.

Sorry, I guess I meant the "Toplink Essentials/Hibernate mashup" that is bundled with the EJB 3.0 spec. How would you compare Hibernate to EclipseLink? In my case we have an existing data model and we'll be trying to match to our database.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2009 13:45

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

Am I doing things wrong by using a Persistence framework like Toplink directly for a web app?

I tried the prescribed EJB 3.0 Entity Bean > Session Bean > Struts Action when building my first sample app but I found the whole process to be incredibly time consuming and annoying just to get some data out of my database. Now I have a project setup where I'm getting data out of Toplink POJOs directly from Struts Actions with named queries and the whole process seems a lot more sane to me.

I'm still not entirely sold on the persistence frameworks either. It looks great for DML but the vast majority of our web work is just getting data out. My experience so far has been that the frameworks sometimes makes this easy and other times a nightmare, especially when I have to try to join a lot of tables together. Is it common to use a combination of plain old SQL queries and persistence frameworks in a web app?

Anyone have any ideas?

# ¿ Apr 27, 2009 04:36

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

1337JiveTurkey posted:

It's got a more declarative language for making UIs and it's supposed to be multiplatform as well. As long as it doesn't depend on any libraries that wouldn't be available on a mobile platform, it'll work on that as well. It also supports WebStart so that it can be used as a standalone application by putting a JNLP file on the server.

It looks cool but does anyone else feel like we've come full circle here? It really does feel like an old fashioned applet.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2009 12:12

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

We've just started using IBatis after a long and troubled struggle with Eclipselink and I think I'm in love. I can write regular SQL and have it map to objects like an ORM, it takes almost any object for parameters, outputs the results to almost anything, lazy loading, caching, dynamic SQL, the list goes on. Its everything I like about ORMs with all the lovely parts removed, and without having to rely on the framework to write dubious SQL.

Has anyone else here used it on any big projects? I'm worried I'm in some sort of honeymoon phase here and I'm going to start to hate it.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2009 13:02

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

This is a strangely specific JSTL question. I'm using forEach to loop through some data that looks like this

Program 1 | Homeless Shelter
Program 2 | Homeless Shelter
Program 3 | Soup Kitchen
Program 4 | Soup Kitchen

Right now I want to write a header whenever the program type (second column) changes. To do this I'm creating a temporary variable, populating it with the program type of the current row at the end of the loop, and then I have some logic at the start of the loop that compares the program type of the current row and the temporary variable and throws up a header when its different.

I feel like there is a better way to do this but I'm coming up short searching around. Any ideas?

# ¿ Jan 21, 2010 20:50

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

Never mind, got it with this little line. Friday afternoon coding

code:

 <c:if test="${site.programList[progRow.index].programTypeCode != site.programList[progRow.index-1].programTypeCode}">

# ¿ Jan 21, 2010 22:00

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

This is pretty specific question but has anyone figured out a way to remote deploy to a Weblogic server using Netbeans? I've fallen in love with the simplicity of Netbeans over jDeveloper but the lack of Weblogic remote deploy is going to be a dealbreaker for using it at work.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2010 16:43

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

necrobobsledder posted:

I've always thought the worst thing about Java isn't the language but the JSR and JCP.

I agree, and the entire web part is a mess. The worst part is that when you start out doing web development in Java everything you read is like "Hey JSF + EJB is the reference, its the way to go!" so you start learning and developing in JSF only to find out its a huge clunky piece of poo poo.

Then 8 months in you realize that all the cool kids are using Struts2 or Spring or anything but JSF and pairing it with Hibernate or iBatis and you feel like a big dick for wasting a ton of time.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2010 13:15

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

jDeveloper, as much as I hated using it, had excellent intellisense. I really don't recommend using it though until it sees about four more updates worth of bug fixes and performance tweaks.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2010 13:00

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

sonic bed head posted:

I don't want to use a sax or document parser because I think it's just way too much for what I really need.

I know you don't want to use a parser and I'm late to the game here but check this out:
http://xstream.codehaus.org/

XML to Objects. Its like magic. If your XML is going to be pretty consistant its a great tool.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2010 13:21

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 15:44

8ender: Sep 24, 2003; clown is watching you sleep

When I used to work in PL/SQL it had the ability for me to compared a string to a comma separated list of other strings like this:

code:


if x in ('One','Two','Three') then

-- Do stuff

end if;

In Java I'm doing something like this:

code:


if (x.equals('One')||x.equals('Two')||x.equals('Three')) {

// Do stuff

}

I'm missing the elegance of the PL/SQL method and the syntax gets really heavy when I'm comparing a lot of things. Is there some easy one liner method that I'm missing?

# ¿ May 4, 2010 15:55

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