Google DataStore with JPA and Spring

I like Google App Engine. It's fast, reliable and free. It also comes with Google DataStore, a NoSQL solution to store data. The only problem is that it isn't that easy to use with the technology you want. We, for instance, wanted to use JPA and Spring. We've been struggling for a little while, but in the end, we managed to get all the right libraries. To make our life easier, we poured all those libraries in a Maven POM file, and made an archetype out of it. That way, we can just generate a new project from that archetype, and we're good to go!

Follow these steps to get started (You need Maven 3 to sucessfully run the app!)

• Download the archetype
• Do a mvn clean install on the POM file
• Generate the artifact using following code:

mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=be.c4j -DarchetypeArtifactId=gae-wicket-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=1.0 -DgroupId=be.c4j -DartifactId=gaeproject -DinteractiveMode=false

• The parts in bold are what defines your projectname and default package
• On the newly created project, do a mvn gae:unpack 
• Now you can mvn gae:run your application
• It's just a simple Wicket Hello World app, but it's a base to start from

This setup was made to prepare our Summer of Technology session. A lot of thanks go to Sebastian Van Sande for sorting out dependency issues and creating the archetype.