Introduction
This year is coming to its end, and it is time to look back and review the important things that happened to JPA Buddy. We had big plans for 2022; it seems like we almost made it. Let’s go through them.
First, we started to earn money in the last year. Some features were made paid, and the number of commercial licenses is growing. Thanks to subscribers, we get some money for further development. We still provide free licenses to students and classroom assistance organizations, etc. We strongly believe that you should get the best tools while studying.
The next feature which we planned to implement was better reverse engineering. And we made it! You can find bulk reverse engineering functionality starting from the very beginning of 2022. Hope that it saved much time for developers.
We also planned to implement smart hints to help you improve your code, but unfortunately, we missed the target. Almost. Instead, you can find a dozen of helpful code inspections. We will continue our work in this area the following year.
Annual statistics
We continued our growth in 2022 and achieved pretty amazing results. Let's leaf through some of the numbers:
- Rolled 30+ releases total and five major versions
- Closed over 500 tickets
- Got over 3M total downloads in JetBrains marketplace
- Deserved 65 5-stars reviews
- Earned over 1200 subscribers on YouTube
- Had over 2,750 messages on our discord channel
- Replied to more than 150 requests by email
- Published seven video guides and nine blog posts about JPA-related technologies
- Gave out almost 2000 free licenses for academic purposes
- Earned over 4000 followers on Twitter
Implemented features
JPA Buddy is gradually becoming something bigger than just a tool for JPA development. Working with DTOs is a daily routine for every developer, so we decided to support it too! Let’s look at this feature and other functionality added to JPA Buddy this year.
Advanced DTO generator
- Keeps DTOs in sync with its entity (add/rename fields)
- Convenient navigation between an entity and its DTO
- Can generate DTOs as Java Records
- Better support for MapStruct
Better reverse engineering
- Bulk reverse engineering – now we can generate entities for the many database tables at once
- Flexible generation settings (ignore characters, schema cache, etc.)
Improved database versioning
- DDL Generator – generate scripts even without Liquibase or Flyway in your project
- IBM DB2 and H2 support
- Generate schema initialization script feature
Additional support for Spring Data JPA
- Bulk repositories generation
- Support for “update” methods
Enhanced Entity Designer
- New editor toolbar
- JPA-specific refactoring: extract attributes to MappedSuperclass action
- New IntelliJ IDEA UI support
Smart Coding Assistance
- Ability to generate all kinds of JPA-related objects from unresolved references
- Code completions and automatic injection for Spring Data repositories and MapStruct mappers
Using Spring Data JPA, Hibernate or EclipseLink and code in IntelliJ IDEA? Make sure you are ultimately productive with the JPA Buddy plugin!
It will always give you a valuable hint and even generate the desired piece of code for you: JPA entities and Spring Data repositories, Liquibase changelogs and Flyway migrations, DTOs and MapStruct mappers and even more!
Conclusion
The JPA Buddy team wishes you happy holidays! 🎄
Many thanks to all developers who use JPA Buddy! We’re also very grateful to those who got in touch to report bugs or share recommendations and ideas. JPA Buddy is growing, thanks to your efforts!
See you next year, cheers 🧡