I'm fairly new to J2EE and have been messing around with alot of little test projects to get a feel and I think I'm ready to create my working project, but would appreciate your insight into structuring it.
Here's what I'm looking to do: All data will be stored in a db. I would like to use OpenJPA and Entity Beans for persistence so that I can demo with a local derby database than repoint to our main server when I want. Sitting on top of those, would be EJBs exposing the business methods that make the entities dance, right? Here's where I get a little hazy, but also where I think OpenEJB will help the most. At first, the app will be a Swing app distributed as a fatjar to people's desks. We have a Tomcat server, but I may not be able to convince my boss to let me put the app there, let alone install Geronimo. So to hedge against that I was going to embed OpenEJB in the app and use it that way at least at first. If he likes it, but wants me to 'webify' it I'd like to be able to simply (within) reason, push the server part to Tomcat (again with OpenEJB) or Geronimo with the Swing app hitting it. In the meantime GWT 1.6 will hopefully be ready and I can convert the frontend. You're insight into the following would be greatly appreciated: 1. Does this seem possible/ reasonable? 2. When it comes to client-server communication which way would best fit this scenario? This is the layer where I have the most problems conceptually. From the doc that I've read there seems to be 101 different ways all with advantages. I could really use help narrowing (not an EJB pun, BTW) my focus. 3. What would be the best non Maven way to organize my project(s) in Eclipse. An EAR for the whole thing? Seperate JPA, EJB, Dynamic Web, Swing,GWT projects? I know lots of folks like Maven, but I've never had any luck with the Eclipse plugin and I've beasically given up on it. Thank you all very much for you help, James
