EJB 3.0 - One Model Inside and Outside the Container (Pt. 1)

I'm writing a suite of (i.e. two) applications which share an object model. I'm a trained J2EE architect and consequently I love the idea of maximum code reuse. I'm also lazy. In the following series of blog entries I'm going to explain how I managed to achieve this using Java 5, EJB 3.0 (including persistence) and Maven.

First up, lets have a quick overview of what I'm trying to achieve. The plan is to create a website to store information about my film collection. I want to be able to do all kinds of fancy things but really it's an excuse to fiddle around with Java 5, generics, annotations, JSF, EJB 3.0 and Maven. I have a cunning plan however. I love the idea of the Flickr uploader but I want to take it further. What if I could have a local, thick Swing app. which I could keep in sync. with my web app. and use to upload and maintain info on my public website? It could use the same model code... That would be cool. It would also let me fiddle with the Matisse GUI builder, Derby and most importantly the Napkin look and feel...

So how am I going to approach this? Well, the plan is to have three separate maven projects, with all the common stuff factored out into a code-less master project (I won't go into this any further, that's a separate blog entry). The first is to be the model project; “loadsamovies-model” which we will discuss in the next blog, the second the web presentation layer; “loadsamovies-presentation” which I don't plan to go into as the techs and methods is covered in great detail elsewhere. The last is the uploader Swing app; “loadsamovies-thickclient”

See the next entry for how I coded up the model.