Vacation in Agioi Apostoloi, Kalamos

 In this new post a destination near to Athens will be briefly presented as an alternative to a daily excursion to the provinces of Attica; far away of the hectic life and the demonstrations of the busy city centre.

A view of the sea from the Panorama area

The place is called Kalamos,  its port Ag.Apostoloi  (the greek for Saint Apostles) and its distance from Athens centre is less than 50 Km, roughly an hour's journey by private car or public, fully air conditioned,  KTEL bus. You can find more about the geographical position here:
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/8841766 I think the images of the sea speak for themselves.

A view from Kalamos Beach hotel

As far as accommodation is  concerned,  there are two hotels  in the Agona area by the beach: the newer and therefore more expensive Delphinia (Greek for dolphins) and the older but cheaper Kalamos  Beach, which now mostly hosts tourists groups from Russia and the eastern Europe. There also are  plenty of rooms, or flats to let by  the seaside, in addition to whole houses for rent. Prices are as low as 270 euros per month for a 100 square meters house. Many German pensioners live in the Agona area all the year round.
During the winter, there might be so heavy snowfall that the landscape resembles that of the Swiss alps. That might happen once in  five years. In such case, no traffic is allowed due to bad weather, one must have made beforehand food, fuel provisions  to last for a period of a few days. Having a power generator in case of a power outage or some extra wood logs for the fireplace is always a good idea. I am sure the locals will be suitable to offer you advice or help during the winter season.

Landscape during winter

When the weather is good, besides swimming, fishing or chatting with the anglers, sailing, sunbathing and enjoying the clean sea, one could visit the woods, the vineyards to consult with the expert wine makers, go sightseeing to the nearby site of Amphiarion which once served as an oracle, the monasteries, Oropos town or the island of Evia and so on. Finally,  a word of caution: during the  hot weekends, especially on Sundays; it is very crowded, there is difficulty in driving a private car in such narrow streets. Thus, during the weekend getting the bus is the ideal suggestion, for trouble free amusement. It is fully recommended to visit this place during working week days, for having your share of carefree fun in the sun!

Further references:
http://www.athensguide.org/blog/2008/11/ktel.html

Comments on EJB 3.0 Database Persistence with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, by Deepak Vohra

On the bright side, the text is well written,  providing a brief synopsis of the ejb 3, (not 3.01 which is the current) background and following a block by block explanation of each snippet of source code used. Apart from using the oracle db, the text presents an example of MySql db server and Eclipse too. The applications are usually tested and deployed to the Weblogic server version 10.1.x.x. g  via ant scripts.
On the dark side the source code consists of orphan files, neither ears, nor whole JDeveloper workspaces; as it is usual in oracle university courses solutions. Moreover, the code seems to be what is printed in the text and has some errors. For example: in chapter 2, on page 33 the  modified ejb-jar.xml deployment descriptor reads like this:

<ejb-ql>
<![CDATA[SELECT OBJECT(a) FROM CatalogBean AS a WHERE a.catalogId = ?1
</ejb-ql>

meaning that the <![CDATA[ tag is not closed properly, as it is easily understood when these lines are pasted to the editor window. In chapter 4,in CatalogTestSessionEJBBean the method is not persistEntity(catalog), but persistCatalog(catalog) and so on. After some investigation or debugging, one persistent reader will probably end up with a working application.  A mistake which occurs numerous times is the number 2 missing from any sql statement with a VARCHAR2 datatype.  Therefore, it seems that gathering the source code of the book was maybe only an afterthought.  Furthermore, some screenshots and relevant text instructions, apply only to older versions of JDeveloper, other than the current 11.1.2. More advanced topics such as tuning, are beyond the scope of this book.

All in all, the text could be a valuable introduction to combining ejb 3 and fusion for JDeveloper funs. This is recommended for zealots of ADF business components, in order to compare both model tier technologies, especially performance. As it was written back in 2010, ejb technology has somehow superceded it. Thus, if you are a Netbeans fun, you will probably think that is an obsolete book. However, the current JDeveloper version does not seem to support ejb 3.01, so to loyal JDevepoper fanatics, it won't make any difference at all!