rdbs2j-0-9-9 released

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RDBS2J 0.9.9 (version 2003-09-07)
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Welcome to RDBS2J!

RDBS2J is a GUI based mapping tool from relational database scheme to
persistent java classes which use JDO as persistence mechanism.
The mapping can be modified by the GUI.
The software is still under construction. The current version is
designed to create code for Jakarta-OJB (http://jakarta.apache.org/ojb/).
The ODMG and the JDO interface are supported. RDBS2J creates the
*.jdo and the repository_user.xml, which is needed by OJB.
My tests were working with jakarta-ojb-0.9.8.

The current download site for rdbs2j is http://sourceforge.net/projects/rdbs2j/

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Copyright (c) 2002,2003 by
CAT Computer Anwendung Technologie GmbH
Oststr. 34, 50374 Erftstadt, Germany

contact: www.cat-gmbh.de
GBeutler@cat-gmbh.de

RDBS2J is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

RDBS2J is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

RDBS2J is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with RDBS2J; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

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This product includes software developed by the
Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).
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CHANGES

0.9.7 initial version
0.9.8 (2003-02-09) errors on parsing of OJB test db script corrected.
the rdbs2j option datatypes now can deal with missing length
and the decimal data type with missing length and scale attribute.
0.9.9 (2003-09-07) added basic support for adding classes to a existing object
model instance.

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Usage of RDBS2J

You need
- JAVA 1.4.1 or higher which you can download from java.sun.com
- Velocity (http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/index.html)
- Ant (http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/index.html)

First extract rdbs2j.tar.gz
At the Velocity distribution there is a jar archiv like velocity-dep-1.3.1-rc2.jar.
Copy this file to the rdbs2j/lib directory. Velocity is used by RDBS2J to
generate the java source code using Velocity Template Language script
files.
Install Ant to build RDBS2J.

Go to the RDBS2J directory and type:

ant run-rdbs2j

Ant now uses the build.xml of RDBS2J, compiles the source files and after
successfully done that, starts the RDBS2J user interface. Currently
the user interface is in German language. I will put it to an english
version as soon as possible.
Alternative you can type:

ant
ant run-rdbs2j

The default (all) section of the Ant build creates a RDBS2J jar file and the
javadoc documentation too.
At the RDBS2J User Interface you can read sql script files or read the
data scheme directly from a jdbc connection (currently without the
foreign key's. I'll implement that for a future version).
Then you can convert the data scheme into a persistence
scheme. Either you can use the default mapping or you can create classes on
your own. After you created some classes you can generate java source code
from the object oriented scheme. At code generation you have to chose a
directory. Go to the directory and then click the cancel button. RDBS2J
then creates all sub-directories and puts the java code, the *.jdo and
the repository_user.xml in it.
A more detailed documentation will follow as soon as possible.

The code generation can be modiefied by using the *.vm VTL scripts which
are located at rdbs2j/source/.
A very good documentation about VTL can be found at the Velocity home page.
The java-jdo.vm file is used to generate the java source code files.
The other vm scripts contains the syntax description of the OJB JDO and
ODMG configuration XML files.

Please note that this release is a beta version I put to sourceforge
to get some feedback especially from the OBJ Team. So I hope you'll
understand that there is no better english documentation availiable
at the moment and the RDBS2J GUI is not as comfortable as it could be.
The way, RDBS2J will go in future, depends on the feedback
we will get.

- Guido