Hi Chris,
Well I certainly do some blatent self-promotion, had to look blatent up
though. :-)

First of all a disclaimer, it is a tool not a product. Its aim is to help
EJB server programmer. It does not lower the knowledge threshold or make
any magic (such as Toplink). It is just a very useful tool for a developer,
which is easy to change has no binaries and there is no vendor lock in
because the generated files may just as well be written manually.

Focus is the data layer were the code may easily follow a pattern which is
appropriate for a certain project.
The component model is described in XML format (Class name members etc. not
references between entites yet... but very soon)
Then when the generation is made, the code is generated according to code
templates which follows the choosen pattern for the data layer (the
implemented pattern is 'moveable object' pattern).
Other files generated may be (the files to generate are decided at
generation time for example entity classes, client proxy classes or the
lot) make files for an EJB, bat files, deployment descriptors etc.

The code templates are quite easy to change, which will make it easy to
insert minor design changes late in a project.

The generator supports roundtrip development where you can regenerate code
during development without overwriting manually added code.


The history is that it was developed during several EJB projects. When I
started consulting for Dagens Nyheter (Swedens b�ggest morning newspaper),
they payed for rewriting it to a more useful form and released it as open
source (the alpha was released 1 month ago).

The status is now that it is used in two projects (I'm involved in both).
It is maturing and is definetly useable. The biggest "bug" now is the very
very bad documentation, which I'm currently writing.

Supported platforms is Linux and Windows. App servers is full support for
WLS and minor support for Sun's RI. When it comes to support. It means
generation of deployment scripts, generation of vendor specific deployment
descriptors etc. The generated EJB's follows the spec and may be used in
any 1.1 compliant app server.

I hope that this explains the generator somewhat. It available at
www.backsource.org and the name is percolator. At Backsource there will
also be in the near future open source EJB components for download.

Regards Erik

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