Much progress with hibernate and JNDI with Jetty

Today I've been reading a lot about Hibernate and setting up JNDI objects in Jetty. I was trying to find out more about how to solve the problem of loading the same sample data set into an hsqld database every time I start Jetty.

At first I had planned to create a servletContextListener that would use DbUnit to import the data when the context is initialized. But since I am using Hibernate's hbm2ddl.auto option for automatically creating the database tables, I wanted to make sure the tables had been created by the time the servletContextListener is supposed to import the data into them.

The first step was to figure out how worked in servlet containers and specifically how to configure Jetty to create them. I set up an hsqld.DataSource and stored it in the InitialContext so it can be retrieved using JNDI. I also noticed you can get objects from JNDI Contexts in Spring's DI container.

Then I moved on to finding out what causes Hibernate to create the tables. First Persistence.createEntityManager(nameOfPersistenceContext) is called, which in turn causes a Hibernate SessionFactory to be created. This automatically exports schema DDL to the database when hbm2ddl.auto is true. Well I took a long break here and noticed that I have to continue with this tomorrow. I have to see if you are supposed to create some webapp-global objects in the servlet container itself or if Spring has some way to create beans that would be global for the servlet container.