Friday 14 September 2007

MiddleGen and Hibernate: Making life easy in the middle

If you have been working in the Hibernate or in the EJB space, chances are high that you have had to write intermediate files such as hbms, in the case of Hibernate, that bridge the gap between the database tables and the Java objects (read POJOs) that exist within the application and are responsible for transporting data around.

While writing the hbm files manually, is a good idea if you really want to learn about how they are structured and the different types of relationships that they can be define within the data model, it becomes a tedious task if your data architect is not sure of what he or she is doing and/or keeps changing the DDL regularly.

In an AGILE project scenario, where requirements are welcomed at late stages of the build process, having a tool that can generate the hbm files and the related Java files (which are essentially POJOs) can be a boon. This is where MiddleGen comes in.

While MiddleGen is basically (an open source) database driven tool for generating code from the database to the presentation layer (Struts), I found its confluence with Hibernate to be really useful. It took me basically half-an-hour to set up MiddleGen and configure the Ant Tasks that came with the sample set of examples (in the MiddleGen download), to connect to my MYSQL database and generate a set of hbm files and their corresponding Java counterparts. In my next post, I'll explain the sequence of steps that I followed in setting up MiddleGen to talk to my database and generating the hbms and the Java files.

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