Over the last couple of days I’ve been trying to pull together a demo of integrating an existing JPA application with Kasabi. It’s been a fun journey learning (and relearning) the JPA spec, and also working with some of the internals of the Hibernate framework. It’s interesting that when a framework becomes really ubiquitous – like Hibernate, in this case – it’s really easy to find online docs and howtos about how to use it, but it’s far harder to sift through all that noise to find docs that help you extend it.

In the end, I did get it working: I re-used the annotation scanning plumbing that Hibernate provides to get access to the JPA configuration, then I walked the object graph marshalling entities as RDF (I used NTriples) before submitting them to a Kasabi dataset.

Of course, to complete the demo, I needed an actual JPA application, so I’ve had some fun re-learning Spring Roo and Grails in order to build a quick database-backed webapp. Normally I dislike scaffolding-based frameworks, but they’re certainly useful for creating a quick functional app.

I’ll submit a link to the code at some point soon.