JPA2 and CloudBees

Besides its “Tomcat-as-a-Service”, the CloudBees service is also offering a hosted MySQL (5.0.51) database. This “database-as-a-service” can be used in various ways. Once you’ve created your database, you can get detailed informations about it in the management console. This console includes a few code samples on how-to configure the hosted database, e.g to be used in JSP or ColdFusion.

Of course, you can also use JPA inside of the CloudBees offer. I’ve tested it with EclipseLink and OpenJPA.

In order to use JPA with the hosted database, you need to include something like below, in your persistence.xml file:

<persistence-unit
  name="myUnit"
  transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">

<class>my.PersistentObject</class>
...

 <properties>
<!-- JPA standard properties -->
<property
   name="javax.persistence.jdbc.driver"
   value="com.cloudbees.jdbc.Driver"/>
<property
   name="javax.persistence.jdbc.url"
   value="jdbc:cloudbees://YOURSCHEMA"/>
<property
   name="javax.persistence.jdbc.user"
   value="USER"/>
<property
   name="javax.persistence.jdbc.password"
   value="PASSWORD"/>
....

That’s all you need! Now you are able to use the database!

Note: For your local development you can also access the DB via a real URL and the regular MySQL driver. The management console does show the remote connection details as well.