Until recently was working hard on the Java Enterprise Beans project, which we presented on Wednesday night. Went fairly well. We took a different slant, and focus on the technology side. Rather then using OpenEJB and Ant and a text editor to edit the various Java and XML files, we set up a real world development environment and EJB compliant appliation server, JBoss. Unfortunately we put so much time and effort into that side of things that we didn't have enough time to implement all the use cases we wanted too. --Wim
Just "finished" a project using FireBird, Enterprise Java Beans, Jboss, and JBuilder all under VMWare with NT4. Anyhow, our group is using JBuilder's very nice built in support for CVS. So, we first spent some time figuring out SSH keys using putty, paegent, and plink.
J2EE and EJB is pretty complicated. The instructor, in his typical style, has rolled up his own bunch of Ant ? scripts and hacked versions of J2EE, MySQL, etc to show people how to use it. His method involves editting and creating hundreds of lines of boilerplate XML/Java. Very ugly... need to manually type in all the SQL to do the select/update/delete/inserts for your each attribute in an object. Not a very clean way of doing Object->Relational entity persistance. JBuilder has a one-click way of generating any type of Bean for given database tables. Once the bean module is created, it's a right-click deal to add more Finders, using J2EE/EJB's Object Query Language or whatever it's called. Kind of like SQL, but not quite.
--Wim