FrontierSuite is a single tool that can help you design, develop, anddeploy your e-business Java applications from start to finish. You can startyour project with UML-based object modeling using Frontier Modeler and moveon to generate EJB entities and deploy using Frontier Deployer. ePersistJserves as CMP (container-managed persistence) and BMP (bean-managed persistence).
FrontierSuite
Providing a persistence framework for Java is extremely challenging.FrontierSuite meets this challenge head-on with its set of integrated tools.It offers a simple interface to provide the persistence framework, alongwith a powerful business-modeling tool and an efficient runtime environmentfor building enterprise Java applications. It’s independent of any database– relational or object-oriented – but any implementation for a specific databasecan be plugged into it.
The product is targeted at enterprise Java developers, including technicalarchitects, business analysts, and Java developers. FrontierSuite is composedof:
• Frontier Modeler: a powerful tool for creating enterpriseobject models using UML standards
• Frontier Builder: a code generator that helps generateenterprise classes, such as EJBs
• Frontier Fusion: a tool that maps objects, includingrelational databases and/or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) to your EIS(Enterprise Information System)
• Frontier Deployer: a versatile tool that allows you togenerate portable deployment descriptors, such as WebLogic- or JBoss-specificconfiguration descriptors, along with an application server
• EPersistJ: An EJB 2.0-compliant unified bean persistencemanager, it’s configurable to serve as a container-managed persistence managerfor EJB servers and a bean-managed persistence manager for EJB applications.Built on JCA architecture and capable of persisting in a relational database,EPersistJ provides distributed caching to enhance the application’s performanceand synchronize objects through the object notification mechanism.
• Frontier ReModeler: Provides a mechanism to read an existingschema from a relational database and an environment to map and generateentity beans and their relations.
• Frontier DeployDirect: Provides CMP for “deployable JAR”files created using third-party tools (EJB 1.1 and 2.0).
Installing FrontierSuite
You can download a 30-day evaluation version of FrontierSuite from ObjectFrontier’sWeb site. Since the product is based on Java, you can install it on Windows,Unix, Linux, or Solaris platforms.
Although it isn’t difficult to install, ObjectFrontier assumes you’veinstalled Java 2 SDK, Enterprise Edition. It also requires you to have JDBClibraries on your machine. The installation documentation doesn’t provideany guidance regarding which version of SDK is required. I used Java 2 SDK,Standard Edition, version 1.3.1_01; Java 2 SDK, Enterprise Edition, version1.3; and Oracle JDBC libraries.
The installation wizard guides you through the installation process,during which it asks you for the license key. This is stored within the KeyValue.txtfile under the LicenseKey directory.
