Max has been doing an interesting series of tutorials using GlassFish, NetBeans and JPA, the Java Persistence API (@Sun, @JCP, FAQ). The original tutorial covered how to Use Hibernate as JPA Provider and the next showed how to use Additional Hibernate Features. The new series explores JSF and ehCache and revisits Hibernate and TopLinkEssentials: [1], [2], [3] and [4].

Fine-grained control. That's the theme for two new features which Wonseok has implemented in TopLink Essentials (TLE). The first is a category-specific logging level control. It allows you to turn up logging for one area of TLE (such as its SQL-related logs) without impacting logging in other areas (such as the cache-related logs). The second is a new cascade refresh query hint. It provides runtime control over whether you want a refresh operation to cascade through to related entities or not.

Sometimes it's little knobs like these that can make a world of difference. So be sure to check out the details in Wonseok's writeup.

The TopLink Essentials committers have approved Wonseok Kim as a new committer. We used a strawman approval process: Tom Ware was the advocate and submitted Wonseok's name and provided context, the TLE committers voted, and Tom carried the count and reported on the results. TopLink Essentials is the Reference Implementation of the Java Persistence API, a project in the GlassFish Community. TLE is gaining good adoption and it runs with at least these containers: GlassFish (v1 and v2), SunAS 9.0, OracleAS 10.1.3.1, Spring 2.0, JEUS 6 and EasyBeans. The volume on its mailing list has been growing nicely in recent months. Wonseok is our first committer outside of the original committers from Oracle and Sun. A very warm welcome.

More Logging... Wonseok has a followup to his earlier blog where he showed how to Configure a Logger Type in TopLink Essentials. Wonseok proposed a new feature based on that blog, which was discussed by the Development team (including Oracle and Sun) at the persistence@glassfish.dev.java.net (e.g. thread). The result allows customization of the logger, including, for example, log4j.

Check Wonseok's blog for details. And please consider posting back your specialized logger, if you need to write a new one.

Logs (and printf()s) are very useful; here are 3 related blogs on this area. The first two show logging for TopLink Essentials (TLE). Adam talks about doing Simple JavaPersistence / SQL monitoring using the machinery included in GlassFish instead of using a JDBC driver like p6spy. Then Wonseok explains how to use the Java Logger when using TLE with Java SE. Meanwhile, Phobos now has an all-JavaScript logging mechanism like Jakarta Logging. Check Roberto's blog; you will need to rebuild Phobos, this is not included in the current binary build.

Adam argues that Java EE 5 applications are More Portable than in earlier (lesser!) releases. Part of this is the natural progression in the specs. Part of this is the Plugability of the JavaPersistence API implementations: in his case he is switching back and forth between Hibernate/JBoss and TopLinkEssentials/GlassFish. Check here for other Java Persistence entries, and, if you are interested in portability of your apps, you may want to read about the AVK (see [1] and [2]).

The implementation of Java Persistence API at Project GlassfiFish is TopLink Essentials. Caching is a key feature in any practical implementation of Java Persistence and Wonseok (from TmaxSoft) has just posted a detailed desciption of How Caching works in TopLink Essentials. TopLink Essentials is used in a number of commertial distributions of GlassFish including Sun (SJS AppServer 9.0 and NetBeans), TmaxSoft (JEUS 6), and Oracle, the original contributor of the technology (see Doug's recent entry on the Previews of OC4J and JDeveloper).