I gave a quickie at Javapolis today about AndroMDA. It was a first for me, and boy it was hard! My goal with this presentation was to act as a counterbalance to last year’s scripting language hype, to show that yes, you CAN be productive with traditional Java frameworks. It’s just a matter of tools and methodology.

And because I wanted to demonstrate that, I actually challenged myself into developing a full-blown JSF/Spring/Hibernate application in front of the audience in just 15 minutes. And I must admit that I had my eyes bigger than my stomach on this one. I’ve repeated my demo something like ten times, and I only managed to do it once in less than 15 minutes. So that one was risky. And as a matter of fact, I made just a small mistake in my modeling that actually led me to fail showing my running application.

But just for the sake of precision, and in case you need to see it working, I’ve actually attached the final application to this post: TodoList sample application. And here is what you need to do to build it:

• You have to install Java 5, Maven 2.0.7 (I’ve not tested it with Maven 2.0.8), MySQL 5, JBoss 4.0.5 GA
• Download mysql-connector-java-bin-5.1.5.jar and copy it to server/default/lib subdirectory of your JBoss installation
• Set JAVA_HOME, JBOSS_HOME and M2_HOME environment variables accordingly
• Create a database called ‘todolist’, and allow a user named ‘todolist’ with a password as ‘todolist’ to do everything on this database
• Run the following commands in the unzipped directory:

mvn -f core/pom.xml andromdapp:schema -Dtasks=create
mvn install -Ddeploy

• Run JBoss
• Browse to http://localhost:8080/todolist

Please let me know if you have any issue or question related to this sample project. Comments are here for that.

And I’ll probably use this sample application as a starting point for a more complete learning thread so stay tuned.

And by the way, if you need more information about AndroMDA itself, please refer to their official website. The AndroMDA forum is very active as well, and if you can’t wait to get started, you will definitely love the official Getting Started Guide, which exists in Java and .Net versions.