In a new article up on otn/java, Java EE expert David Heffelfinger continues his series exploring the relative strengths and weaknesses of Java EE and Spring. Here, he demonstrates how easy it is to develop the data layer of an application using Java EE, JPA, and the NetBeans IDE instead of the Spring Framework.

In the first two parts of the series, he generated a complete Java EE application by using JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.1, and Java Persistence API (JPA) 2.0 from Spring’s Pet Clinic MySQL schema, thus showing how easy it is to develop an application whose functionality equaled that of the Spring sample application.

In his new article, Heffelfinger tweaks the application to make it more user friendly.

From the article:
“The generated application displays primary keys on some of the pages, and these keys are surrogate primary keys—meaning that they have no business value and are used strictly as a unique identifier—so there is no reason why they should be visible to the user. In addition, we will modify some of the generated labels to make them more user-friendly.”

He concludes the article with a summary:
“The Java EE version of the application is not a straight port of the Spring version. For example, the Java EE version enables us to create, update, and delete veterinarians as well as veterinary specialties, whereas the Spring version of the application enables us only to view veterinarians and specialties. Additionally, the Spring version has a single page for managing/viewing owners, pets, and visits, whereas the Java EE version of the application has separate pages for each of these entities.
The other thing we should keep in mind is that we didn’t actually write a lot of the code and markup for the Java EE version of the application, because the bulk of it was generated by the NetBeans wizard.”

Have a look at the complete article here.