Enhance OpenJPA entities with Gradle

OpenJPA has a Maven plugin but doesn’t provide a gradle plugin (yet?) but build-time enhancing is still a nice solution to ensure your entities will behave correctly whatever deployment you choose (in a plain TomEE the built-in javaagent does the work well but in embedded tests it is not guaranteed).

Is that a reason to abandon Gradle? Maybe not yet ;).

Oh My js! Server side javascript for java developers?

Javascript tooling set was enriched a lot these last years: npm, bower, gulp, grunt, … but most of them work on nodejs and need a certain amount of knowledge before being able to get anything from it.

For a Java developer it can be complicated and tempting to do a plain JSP instead of embrassing javascript.

Making javascript development easy can only be done in the case of a framework with a lot of defaults cause by nature you need to develop in an exploded fashion (by module) fr the maintenance and aggregate them at the end for performances reasons (HTTP 2.x will maybe make it smoother but will likely not replace it completely).

If your project is before all a frontend project you need to go on js side but if your project is simple and more centered on the data or the server side we can probably find a compromise.

This was the origin of “Oh My js!” which is a small library I created to integrate the pipeline I often use for frontend development with Maven and the Java stack I use (TomEE if you doubt of it ;)).

First of all what needs do I want to cover and which ones I’ll ignore:

• dependency management: ignored. I only want to handle runtime js dependencies and they are not that numerous in general so it can be done manually or worse case using webjars and a small groovy script for the optimization – will not be part of this post but can be another one if needed
• build: yes and no. There are multiple parts of a build in javascript: the “big final aggregation” which aims to put all resources we can in a single file to make client loading faster and (optional) each module transpilation/rendering/compilation/… This is this last part we will target
• test: java has a good tooling to do it but see next note for a more nuanced answer
• packaging: not sure javascript has a real packaging model yet but java has so all is fine and secured
• deployment: I build a war so maven/gradle are perfect

Of course I listed far more that what this post will cover but it was to show that the “blocking” part for a java developer is finally small enough to get some work to fill the gap.

Side note: frontend-maven-plugin is a great tool bringing to maven nodejs tooling (npm, bower, gulp, karma…). This however still needs to know these tools and just provide a “main-build” friendly solution so the initial cost can be important but it can worth it if you will need a lot of javascript.

@Throttled: the CDI extension

In JavaEE the throttling is often done using a stateless bean cause they are by designed pooled and the pool provide a contention point. This is however IMO a workaround more than a solution for the throttling need and a small CDI extension can be worth it.