It seems that the ejb value objects are somewhat incomplete.
Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to do some work on them. There are a few
flaws that I see in the value objects now.
1) No synchronization. It is likely that under some situations it would be nice
to be able to turn on synchronization.
2) Returning bare collections. We should return unmodifiable collections to
force less error prone code.
3) Synchronized collections should be an option, once again, to reduce the
dangers of multi threaded code.
4) Should implement Cloneable.
5) Implement Comparable?
6) Should not use arrays to pass around relationship data, the construction and
deconstruction of arrays is inefficient, especially for large numbers of
arrays.
7) Should not allow outside access to setAdded*s(), and other bookkeeping
collections.
As a result, I made the following changes.
1) implemented Comparable.
2) Added an "ordering" class level option.
a) ordering = "strict", ordering/equality/hashCode is only dependant on
the primary key of the object. Object implements Comparable if and only if all
primary key fields are Comparable.
b) ordering = "permissive". equality/hashCode based on all fields, but
not relationships.
c) default is "permissive"
3) Added "synchronization" class level option.
a) synchronizaton = "none": same as before.
a) synchronization = "partial": all [Collection|Set]s become
Collections.synchronized[Collection|Set]();
a) synchronization = "full": Same as "partial", but all methods
synchronized as well.
4) All returned [Collection|Set]s are
Collections.unmodifiable[Collection|Set](...).
5) Added get*Collection() method that returns unmodifiable [Collection|Set] of
the relations.
In the future, we may wish to remove a few of the more dangerous methods.
Also, the EJB (CMP) template should automatically create properly named
get*Value() and set*Value(*Value input) methods without requiring the addition
of them into the Bean class, if it is abstract. Have an option to make the
ejbCreate(*Value input) and ejbPostCreate(*Value input) method as well, if bean
class is abstract.
What do you all think? Any suggestions?
-Tyler
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