More Rails than Rails?

A while ago I wrote about the Rails influence on Java frameworks. It seems that the Rails lesson has been applied to a combination of Netbeans (in its 5.5 beta version) and Glassfish. A week or two ago Geertjan explained how to use a couple of Netbeans wizards to generate Entity classes from an imported relational database schema together with a default set of JSF backed JSPs, to generate a basic, but working, web application which allows the user to list, add, edit and delete records from any of the included database tables. Geertjan’s post has generated a fair amount of excitement. Netbeans 5.5 takes the Rails experience and takes it that little bit further, at least in the area of generating skeleton CRUD web applications.

I’m not sure, but I think that Geertjan’s example uses the bundled Java DB database (formally known as Derby). I have reproduced this functionality with a MySQL database of my own devising - a simple schema with 6 tables. The only extra step necessary was to add the MySQL JDBC driver jar to the Glassfish domain’s classpath (put the jar file in <GLASSFISH_HOME_DIRECTORY>/domains/domain1/lib) assuming that your domain is called ‘domain1′, which is the default. I can vouch for Geertjan’s claims - this could represent a wonderful advance in productivity.

I think that Netbeans 5.5 and Glassfish are shaping up to be a winning combination.