Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
In theory, using JPA and Spring is supposed to make magical things happen that will make me more productive and allow me to accomplish wonderful things.
Someday. At the moment, I gain tons of productivity only to waste it when deployment time comes and I have to fight the variations in servers.
JPA allows coding apps using POJOs for data objects. You can then designate their persistence via external XML files or using Java Annotations. The Spring Framework handles a lot of the “grunt” work in terms of abstract connection to the data source, error handling and so forth.
But that, alas, is just the beginning.
First and foremost, I had to build and run using Java 1.5. OpenJPA 1.2 doesn’t support Java 6.
Tomcat is not a full J2EE stack. To serve up JPA in Tomcat requires a JPA service – I used Hibernate-entitymanager.
JPA requires a little help. Specifically, I used the InstrumentationLoadTimeWeaver to provide the services needed to process the annotations.
The weaver itself requires help. And to enable the weaver in Tomcat, I needed the spring-agent.
To the Tomcat6 lib directory I added:
- spring-tomcat-weaver jar
- spring-agent jar
But that’s not enough! The agent won’t turn itself on automatically. So I need to add a “-javaagent” to Tomcat’s startup. The easiest way to do that was to create a CATALINA_BASE/bin/setenv.sh file:
#!/bin/sh
CATALINA_BASE=/usr/local/apache-tomcat-6.0.18
JAVA_OPTS=”-javaagent:$CATALINA_BASE/lib/spring-agent-2.5.4.jar”
Tomcat 5
I think this all works more or less the same in Tomcat5, except that there are 3 library directories instead of the one library that Tomcat6 uses so the location for the spring suport jars is different. common/lib seems to work, although I’m not sure it’s the best choice.
That’s half the battle. Next up: JSF/RichFaces – and Maven
