[zambizzi]

I’ve been experimenting w/ the Java EE 5 capabilities of 5.5M2 for a couple of days now and I thought I’d post some feedback…and ask a few questions.

So far, it looks like 5.5 is off to a great start – I was able to create an EE 5 project, reverse-engineer some entities from an MSSQL 2000 db, and deploy it successfully. However, it still leaves me wanting as far as features. I have to compare it to Netbeans 5.5 since it’s the “other” free tool supporing EE 5 – which it does every well for a first supporting release. The Java EE 5 features are more deeply integrated in NB and provide for a lot of conveniences. Are there any plans to build deeper EE 5 support into MyEclipse going forward? I’ve always thought of MyEclipse as the ultimate Java dev tool w/ more features than I’d ever be able to use….however Java EE 5 support seems rather thin in comparison to NB 5.5. The first thing that comes to mind is the right-click features NB has for performing Java EE 5 tasks (e.g. adding an entity manager to a session bean, calling a session bean from a JSF backing bean, and more…)

The only other criticism I can offer is a lack of default configuration options for EE 5 features. It’d be nice to be able to customize the output of the generated EJBs, config files, etc.

Other than that, thanks for supporting Java EE 5! With some improvements it could easily be the best option out there for enterprise development going forward!!

[Riyad Kalla]

Are there any plans to build deeper EE 5 support into MyEclipse going forward?

Absolutely. This is just our first-pass at it. JEE 5 is a major focus of MyEclipse going forward. Web services, the whole story.

The only other criticism I can offer is a lack of default configuration options for EE 5 features. It’d be nice to be able to customize the output of the generated EJBs, config files, etc.

Can you clarify what you mean here? We do have much more to do, and if I can turn these requests into spceific feature requests I definately will give them to the team.

[zambizzi]

@support-rkalla wrote:

The only other criticism I can offer is a lack of default configuration options for EE 5 features. It’d be nice to be able to customize the output of the generated EJBs, config files, etc.

Can you clarify what you mean here? We do have much more to do, and if I can turn these requests into spceific feature requests I definately will give them to the team.

Absolutely….I’ll outline them as best as I can:

1. Allow configuration of how annotations are generated when creating entities. For example, I prefer my private fields to be annotated vs. doing on the getter methods.

2. I also prefer using List for my collections in one-to-many, many-to-many relationships…myeclipse defaults to Set/Hashset. It’s tedious to change this after generating code.

3. The persistence.xml that is generated is not comprehensive enough. It’d be nice if it provided all available JPA properties but had them commented-out initially. For example, I had to add the Hibernate dialect I wanted JBoss’s JPA (Hibernate) to use and I had to fish around in my old files to find the property to paste in. Others might include the following:

        <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
        <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect"/>
        <property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="true"/>
        <property name="hibernate.format_sql" value="true"/>
        <property name="hibernate.use_sql_comments" value="true"/>
        <property name="hibernate.max_fetch_depth" value="1"/>

I know there are more….but the most widely used would be nice to have by default…so it wouldn’t require fishing for info outside of the IDE when creating a persistence unit.

4. Netbeans has right-click integration that automates the generation of a lot of Java EE 5 related stuff like EntityManager in a session bean, making @EJB calls to existing beans, etc. It’d be *great* to have some or all of the Netbeans JEE 5 features in myeclipse.

Thanks for listening! Great work so far!

[Riyad Kalla]

Great suggestions, I’ll send them to the team.

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