JPA 2 on Seam 2

As intelligently pointed by Thomas on CTP Java blog starting a Java Web application today from scratch presents you an interesting crossroads. If you stick with the proven Seam 2 option you end up also with its deficiencies not to mention some old versioned libraries. The other option is experimenting with Seam 3 but this on the other hand has few knowledge critical mass around. But with a few changes, Seam 2 can still provide value and at least Hibernate/JPA version can be improved bringing a bunch of bugfixes (eg.: proper schema generation that in Hibernate 3.3 was buggy – even though HHH1012 says it is fixed I never saw this on any 3.3 release) and new features (eg.: criteria api as also pointed by Thomas).

I’ve followed Thomas instructions but instead of coding the proxy method by method I suggest using Java Dynamic Proxies:

import java.lang.reflect.InvocationHandler;
import java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;
import java.lang.reflect.Proxy;

import javax.persistence.EntityManager;

import org.jboss.seam.persistence.PersistenceProvider;

public class Jpa2EntityManagerProxy implements InvocationHandler {

private EntityManager delegate;

public Jpa2EntityManagerProxy(EntityManager delegate) {
super();
this.delegate = delegate;
}

public Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method, Object[] args)
throws Throwable {
if (method.getName().equals("getDelegate")) {
return PersistenceProvider.instance().proxyDelegate(
delegate.getDelegate());
} else {
try {
return method.invoke(delegate, args);
} catch (InvocationTargetException e) {
throw e.getTargetException();
}
}
}

public static EntityManager newInstance(EntityManager entityManager) {
return (EntityManager) Proxy.newProxyInstance(
Jpa2EntityManagerProxy.class.getClassLoader(),
new Class[] { EntityManager.class },
new Jpa2EntityManagerProxy(entityManager));
}
}

Apart from this change I followed Thomas instructions as-is and it got JPA2 with Hibernate 3.5 working in my project.