Eclipse JPA tooling, Hibernate (jboss) tooling

Working on ways to improve the tooling/work environment when in a JPA project.

In the past, pretty much hand-code everything and rely on maven/unit-tests to catch errors.

Quicknote experiences:

* To get JPA Tooling working, need to map the jdbc driver manually/directly to the filesystem jar location through the Eclipse->DataManagement features.

* More on JPA tooling, particularly with maven layout, here: http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&goto=508143

* To get Hibernate Tooling working, need to add the jdbc driver to the classpath, EVEN IF you are using Database Connection:JPA project configured option (i.e. see above direct jar filesystem mapping does not carry over to Hibernate Tooling).

* In the persistence.xml, to avoid dealing with a lot of issues, remove JTA requirements. This works for me as the Entity class/domain are in a project seperate from the Session Bean (the Entity Managers), so the Entity class/domain has a non-JTA persistence.xml, while the Session Bean (entity manager) project has a JTA persistence.xml. I hate inconsistencies, but only way this seems to work.


Gains:

* In JPA tooling, immediately checked the model to the database structure, and identified a couple of case-sensitivity issues between the field name and the column name that were easy to fix.
* In Hibernate tooling, can test-run jpa-ql queries to see if they work as expected, timing, and review results. Can also look at the Dynamic SQL Preview to see the actual sql used for future index optimizations.