Annotatiomania™ 2.1

It’s been a while since I have last ranted about annotations and the increasing Annotatiomania™ in the JEE ecosystem. I haven’t been exposed to much JEE either, until yesterday, when I was confronted with an awesome talk by Adam Bien at ch-open, where I’ve also held a talk about jOOQ. JEE 7 ships with lots of goodies.

But then, I saw this!

Let me treat you to a introductory example of how to use a stored procedure through JPA 2.1, which our friends from EclipseLink have had the courtesy to share with us:

    @NamedStoredProcedureQuery(
       name="ReadUsingMultipleResultSetMappings",
       procedureName="Read_Multiple_Result_Sets",
       resultSetMappings={
           "EmployeeResultSetMapping", 
           "AddressResultSetMapping", 
           "ProjectResultSetMapping", 
           "EmployeeConstructorResultSetMapping"
       }
   )
   
   @SqlResultSetMappings({
       @SqlResultSetMapping(
           name = "EmployeeResultSetMapping",
           entities = {
           @EntityResult(entityClass=Employee.class)
           }
       ),
       @SqlResultSetMapping(
           name="EmployeeConstructorResultSetMapping",
           classes = { 
               @ConstructorResult(
                   targetClass = EmployeeDetails.class,
                   columns = {
                       @ColumnResult(
                           name="EMP_ID", 
                           type=Integer.class
                       ),
                       @ColumnResult(
                           name="F_NAME", 
                           type=String.class
                       ),
                       @ColumnResult(
                           name="L_NAME", 
                           type=String.class
                       ),
                       @ColumnResult(
                           name="R_COUNT", 
                           type=Integer.class
                       )
                   }
               )
           }
       )
   })
   public Employee(){
       ....
   }

Obviously, Eclipse Copernicus (or what’s Kepler’s successor?) will ship with an Enterprise-licensed source code formatter built by Nobel Prize mathematicians to actually display the above. With that license, you also get a 50% discount coupon on the latest 67″ Samsung flat screen for an Enterprise coding experience. Awesome!

Also, whenever I hear “ReadUsingMultipleResultSetMappings”, I immediately think J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource, too. Some powerful permutation mathematics and random natural language processing is thus involved.

Not just did JPAnnotatiomania™ 2.1 treat us with stored procedure support, named fetch graphs are now also part of the game. Do note that with only a few lines of code, we will finally be safe from writing tedious SQL! Behold:

   @NamedEntityGraph(
       name="ExecutiveProjects"
       attributeNodes={
           @NamedAttributeNode("address"),
           @NamedAttributeNode(
               value="projects", 
               subgraph="projects"
           )
       },
       subgraphs={
           @NamedSubgraph(
               name="projects",
               attributeNodes={
                   @NamedAttributeNode("properties")
               }
           ),
           @NamedSubgraph(
               name="projects",
               type=LargeProject.class,
               attributeNodes={
                   @NamedAttributeNode("executive")
               }
           )
       }
   )

Another 5000$ spent on formatting licenses to format the above.

Conclusion

No longer shall effective developers be paid by the lines of code, but they should be paid by the lines of @-signs they write. And I’m surely looking forward to Adam Bien’s next talk, about JEE 7 Best Practices!