Release Notes <b-frame/> 0.2

1. Using Entity Beans
2. Adding user-defined factories
3. Refactoring
4. Documentation

1. Using Entity Beans

With this release it is possible to use Entity Beans as the data storage backend.  You may also decide whether Entity and Session Beans should be accessed via remote (RMI) or local method calls. The former makes sense if web server and application server are supposed to run on different hosts. Otherwise the local view is much more efficient.

To do this you have to modify the application descriptor, e.g., "university.xml" to contain a single tag configuring the way the application will be generated.

<bf-app:application
    xmlns:bf-app="http://www.b-frame.org/b-frame/app"
    name="university">

    <bf-app:ejb type="local" entity="true"/>
    ...
</bf-app:application>

The <bf-app:ejb> has two parameters: type determines whether the access to the facade should be implemented via a remote or a local call. The second parameter entity determines whether to use Entity Beans or Data Access Objects (which is the default).

For more details please refer to the Tutorial.

2. Adding user-defined factories

In order to extend or adapt the default business logic it is possible to override the used factories. To do so you just have to supply a Java class whose fully qualified name is referenced in the application descriptor. Currently, the source file must be located in the project’s sub folder "src", e.g., in "bframe-examples/university/src". The class must implement the generated interface. It is also possible to extend the generated factory class and override just those methods which are of interest

For more details please refer to the Tutorial.

3. Refactoring

The distribution has been split into to parts: The <b-frame/> base directory which contains the framework generator and an examples directory call b-frame-examples. Thus,
the base directory needs not to be touched anymore, but the examples directory, which you can use as a template for your own projects.
The build process is controlled by build scripts contained in the examples directory, these scripts need to be edited before building projects.

<b-frame/> now uses JBoss 3.2.2 which is included in the distribution (stripped to the bones, however, to make it smaller).

4. Documentation

The tutorial at http://www.b-frame.org/applications.pdf has changed a lot.