ITP hibernate, hsqldb, xdoclet

[Bear Giles <bgiles@coyotesong.com>]

I thought that Java on Debian was pretty much dead, glad to see I 
was mistaken.

I'm currently Debianizing a number of Java package that I've been 
using locally.  I made them apt-friendly, but they were otherwise 
entirely independent of the Debian project.

The first three packages up are all standards from SourceForge:

hibernate-java
   Object-relational database mapping tool.  You write the class 
and define various properties, hibernate transparently maps it to 
pretty much any relational database.  It can be called directly, 
or indirectly through DAOs or EJBs.

hsqldb-java
   Pure Java relational database that can be run entirely out of 
memory.  HSQLDB and its predecessor Hypersonic provide a 
lightweight alternative to MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, and 
provide a good tool for importing CSV formatted tables from the 
people who insist on using Microsoft Excel.

xdoclet-java
   Code generation engine.  You either love it or hate it, I love it.

XDoclet is an incredibly powerful tool when combined with 
Hibernate and various types of EJB - in fact JBoss recently hired 
the main contributor to Hibernate to work on integration.  For 
instance, any class stored in the database has additional comments 
like

 /**
  * @hibernate.class table="foos"
  */
 public class Foo implements Serializable {

    private Long id;
    private String barCode;

    /**
     * @hibernate.id generator-class="sequence"
     */
    public Long getId() { return id; }
    private void setId(Long id) { this.id = id; }

    /**
     * @hibernate.property column="bar_code" size="20"
     * @struts.validator type="required" msgkey="errors.required"
     */
    public String getBarCode() { return barCode; }
    public void setBarCode(String bc) { barCode = bc; }
}

and from that and a couple templates XDoclet generates my 
hibernate mapping files, my FooDAO interface and FooDAOHibernate 
implementation of that interface, and a FooForm view that is used 
by the presentation layer in my struts application.  Hibernate 
itself can create the database schema on any supported database. 
I'm still learning what else it can do....

Packages to follow...  I expect that they may require a quick 
iterator or two to get work out the kinks for Debian use.

Bear