Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Transparent DataNucleus enhancement at run-time

Today it has worked! In the last days I was working to avoid the enhancement phase in the building of Roma Framework projects. Yes. Until yesterday you needed to invoke the "persistence-compile" task in your Roma project and all the projects that contained persistent classes.

Furthermore pre-packaged modules such as ADMIN, USERS, MESSAGING and SCHEDULER-QUARTZ needed to self-execute the enhancement in order to put persistence capable classes inside the JAR. This was a mess if you needed to change the ORM binding since anything resided inside the JAR.

I have to check yet if run-time changes to the entity POJOs are auto-enhanced at the fly... If works the productivity would be speedup over and over again.

Thanks to Andy Jefferson of DataNucleus team in supporting my crazy requestes :-) The work tomorrow will be in changing all the wizards to support the new configuration. In few words the change consist in:
  1. Let to the PersistenceAspect to invoke the Enhancer at startup
  2. Create the file persistence.xml inside the src/META-INF folder.
Once everything works I'll commit in to the SVN trunk for the upcoming release 2.0.

2 comments:

Idea factory worker said...

I'm trying to do the same thing. Do you have a sample of how to perform the runtime enhancement using the API?

Luca Garulli said...

At the end my patch wont work, sorry. But I don't work on that since that post.