Software Secret Weapons: Linguine Maps For Apache Ob Ject Relational Bridge

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Linguine Maps for Apache ObJectRelationBridge (OJB) is an open-source utility that will automatically produce easy to read UML-style entity-relation diagrams from OJB mapping files. The diagram shows all the entities with their attributes from the original OJB mapping files and the relationships between entities.

There is absolutely no manual work! It is fully automatic! Use it online now! Just paste your favorite database OJB mapping file into a web form and instantly view a diagram! With a diagram it will take you only minutes to become familiar with OJB mapping files. Having UML-style diagrams is a great way to improve team communication. Diagrams are better understood by business people, compared to the source code. And developers can always go back to source files when more details are needed.

Here we defined a simple OJB mapping file for customer/order/line item. And converted it to a diagram. It is that easy!


<descriptor-repository version="1.0">
  <class-descriptor class="Customer">
    <field-descriptor name="id" jdbc-type="INTEGER"/>
    <field-descriptor name="name" jdbc-type="VARCHAR"/>
    <collection-descriptor name="orders" element-class-ref="Order"
      auto-delete="object">
      <inverse-foreignkey field-ref="id"/>
      </collection-descriptor> 
  </class-descriptor>    

  <class-descriptor class="Order">
    <field-descriptor name="id" jdbc-type="INTEGER"/>
    <field-descriptor name="name" jdbc-type="VARCHAR"/>
    <field-descriptor name="date" jdbc-type="TIMESTAMP"/>
    <field-descriptor name="customerId" jdbc-type="INTEGER"/>
    <reference-descriptor name="customer" class-ref="Customer">
      <foreignkey field-ref="customerId"/>
    </reference-descriptor>	 
    <collection-descriptor name="items" element-class-ref="LineItem"
      auto-delete="object">
      <inverse-foreignkey field-ref="id"/>
    </collection-descriptor>        
  </class-descriptor> 
    
  <class-descriptor class="LineItem">
    <field-descriptor name="id" jdbc-type="INTEGER"/>
    <field-descriptor name="qty" jdbc-type="INTEGER"/>
  </class-descriptor>    
</descriptor-repository>

There are many more sample diagrams available for OJB mapping files.

Linguine Maps is written in Java and provides clean object-oriented diagramming API for graph visualization. We developed a full set of Apache ANT tasks for integrating programmatic visualization with the build process. This package also contains demo applications that show you how to visualize abstract graphs.

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