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There comes a time in pretty much every programming project when you need to communicate with a database of some sort.  When doing this in Java, one choice is to manipulate DriverManagers or DataSources directly.  However, if you want to take advantage of POJOs to represent your data from the database, manipulating data as objects, you might be staring down the task of writing all sorts of ugly reflection code or a really long constructor to make this happen.  There is an alternative: the Java Persistence API. Old news, buddy! JPA is old-school, clocking in at over 10 years old!  (Jeez, I might as well bust out my IBM 5150 .)  However, I did not feel like writing reflection like what was done on the last project, so I searched for an alternative.  JPA provides you a mechanism to add in details pertaining to object/relational metadata (ORM), and thus run all sorts of CRUD operations with minimal code, by offering convenience functions for these oper...

There are several ways to configure Maven to run designated tests separately in a Java project.  Usually, people want to distinguish between unit tests and other types of automated tests during a build.  Unit tests are fast because you are mocking all the external services that the particular code under test is relying upon.  They’re also typically smaller than functional tests, since they are (supposed to be ;) testing a unit of code rather than an entire feature . However, functional tests are also critical to the success of your project.  You or your managers are probably interested in seeing automated end-to-end usage of your application running constantly without errors, but how is this possible without annoying the developers as they wait for all the tests to finish? The Maven Failsafe plugin is most helpful in separating unit from functional tests.  By default, it focuses on tests whose filename follows the specific pattern: **/IT*.java *...