Testing JPA

So, I've gotten very comfortable with the whole Spring/Hibernate mashup.  I really can't think of a better way to do database transactions than using hibernate to map the database and Spring to inject the Hibernate sessions into which ever component needs it.  It is simple and it just simply works...

 

One of my favorite things about using Hibernate is the Criteria search capabilities.  Basically it is a very OO way to do simple queries - you can get kind of clever with them but for the most part simple is better.   And in my opinion if you're writing queries that can't be done with Criteria's your data model probably sucks and needs to be re-worked... like that is ever an option.

 

Anyway I've recently joined the Architecture team and I was having a conversation espousing the glory and ease of use of these criteria's when somebody popped their head up over the cube wall and said "Why would you use Criteria's anyway they're not supported by the JPA specification."

 

Which is unfortunately true... for now anyway.

 

So, my last project was with JSF which was delivered successfully but it was extremely painful.  Mostly due to IBM's horrible implementation with their 5.0 portal server - heh, yeah it was even jdk1.3 how cool is that?

 

As that project is closing off I've been thinking on some of the pain points of that my team and I went through.  This contemplation led me to SEAM which led me to EJB3 and JPA.

 

So that's twice that JPA has come up recently so I decided to start poking around and see if I can figure the new specification out.  Indeed I have lost my beloved criteria's and once again an forced to contaminate my java code with SQL like syntax.  I can live without that temporarily anyway as long as I have a robust testing model.  So far the best I've seen is integrating with Spring to do it.  But isn't EJB3 supposed to handle the IOC for me? 

 

So after more searching than their should have been I found this article that takes you to a Sun Tutorial on desktop Java so with just a little bit massaging I can now run Junit test cases with just JPA, very sweet...