Background

Many of you might have at least heard of the J2EE Blue Prints/PetStore. In many ways, the J2EE Blue Prints/PetStore was far ahead of it's time. It helped establish some degree of order out of the chaos of mid-nineties enterprise development. It brought to the mainstream many architectural patterns like separation of concerns, layering, MVC, DAO, DTO and the like that we now mostly take for granted. It also helped catapult J2EE itself. The PetStore of course was not without its own fair share of problems. The most significant of these problems is the fact that many patterns in the PetStore were either motivated or encumbered by the problems of the then relatively new J2EE and EJB 2 technologies and EJB 2 entity beans did not support OO well.

DDD provided concrete solutions to the weaknesses in the PetStore with the help of emergent concepts of POJO programming, ORM and lightweight frameworks. It is no accident that DDD is now widely adopted by the Spring, .NET and Rails communities. As Java EE has now fully embraced concepts like POJO programming, lightweight programming models, annotations, ORM, rich domain models, agility and testability, this project brings things full circle. It demonstrates first hand how you can utilize the best of the breed in enterprise software development practices using the power and simplicity of the standard, vendor-neutral Java EE platform. Notably unlike the J2EE Blue Prints/PetStore, we will not invent new patterns here but simply adopt the proven, mature ideas in the DDD community.