Posted under Spring
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Tags JPA, Spring, Tomcat
This post is to explore best practice in this area.
The reason is that I am looking at a stack based on JSF/ICEfaces or PrimeFaces/Tomcat/JPA, as I have a project in mind to run in a hosted environment and Tomcat hosting is easier and cheaper than JBoss/Glassfish hosting.
Spring’s JPATemplate looks useful, but ties you to a Spring standard rather than an open (JPA) one which is vendor independent.
I am always wary when I read in a vendor’s documentation that “such and such an interface abstracts all the other interfaces used by other vendors/standards etc.”
Whilst of course abstraction is a good thing, you do end up tied to the abstraction interface and so need to be aware of the implications of this!
On face value (and I have not explored this at all yet as I am just starting to look at Spring) it seems a backwards step to encapsulate a platform/container independent standard (JPA) which has cross platform support with a platform/container specific one (Spring)?
This post (which I have yet to explore in detail) suggests that it is cleaner not to use Spring’s JPA support classes, which makes sense to me.
The True Way Of Developing Applications has been disturbed and that is damn good. For starters, please take a moment to read these articles in order:
Getting started with JPA and Spring
JPA Annotations Guide (broken link)
Advanced JPA with spring
- What will happen if you do:
- No more need for hibernate mapping files; everything will work from annotations, persistent classes are automagically discovered, and greenfield projects can have the database automatically generated. Controller interceptors can be substituted with Transaction annotations, which is much easier to understand and maintain. Spring will generate interceptors anyway but at least you do not have to be so aware of them.
- No more need of JpaDaoSupport and JpaTemplate. They were a great commodity with JDBC and raw Hibernate, but with JPA it’s cleaner if you do not use the support classes.
- Do not forget to make your test classes extend AbstractJpaTests so that Spring can inject your attributes.
I will continue to post links and discusssions here as I explore it in more detail.
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