fuzzylizard

I am seriously thinking of moving “Teamdocs”:http://teamdocs.fuzzylizard.com to “Google Code”:http://code.google.com/hosting. The main reason is not out of any dislike for its current home on JavaForge, but because I really like the simplicity of Google. One thing I have really not liked about JavaForge is that it is simply too complicated. There are too many options and too many tabs and too many things to administer. Google code hosting is simple and easy to use. When or if I make the move I will post the details on the teamdocs website.

“ZDNet has an article”:http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=151 up on Google Code along with a series of photos.

One problem that I have been having developing TeamDocs is in the area of dealing with Lazy Loading and Hibernate. Specifically, when I load some objects using a DAO and then send those objects to the View to be loaded I kept getting an exception: LazyInitializationException: Session has been closed. This has been driving me nuts. I finally “found the solution”:http://www.hibernate.org/43.html in a post on the “Hibernate webiste”:http://www.hibernate.org.

bq. A first solution would be to open another unit of work for rendering the view. This can easily be done but is usually not the right approach. Rendering the view for a completed action is supposed to be inside the first unit of work, not a separate one. The solution, in two-tiered systems, with the action execution, data access through the Session, and the rendering of the view all in the same virtual machine, is to keep the Session open until the view has been rendered.

Unfortunately, I don’t fully understand the solution yet, but I do know it works.

The above article on the Hibernate website goes along with this one on “Sessions and Transactions”:http://www.hibernate.org/42.html which describes concepts like “Units of Work”, “Transactions”, “Transaction Demarcation with JDBC”, and other topics. You should probably read this article before the one listed above.

Have you ever wanted to ask Linux Torvalds a question, or how about James Gosling, or Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmer book (not Wendy’s)? Well, the person behind StiffBlog did just that in an article called Stiff asks, great programmers answer. This is a series of questions that were emailed to the 10 programmers and the resulting answers. I found the answers fascinating. Each one reveals a little bit more about the people that geeks have come to either respect or loath. If you are a programmer you should definitely read the article.

One thing that I have been thinking about since posting my “previous blog entry”:http://www.fuzzylizard.com/archives/2006/07/20/750/ is how to start a project with a brand new or inexperienced team. What is the best way of going about bringing a team of junior/intermediate programmers, with no senior developers, up to speed? And, once they are “up to speed”, how do you keep them progressing forward in their development? Unfortunately, this is the problem that my team faces.

The consequence of this is that (a) we waste a lot of time as developers relearning things and (b) there are simply some things that we would like to try that are beyond our current programming capabilities. In addition, everything we do is trial and error as no one on the team has done anything similar before (we are slowly moving into known territory as we are about to release the second implementation of some software which will provide the team some common ground from which to start off from).

I am not sure where I got this link from, but the article,
Five Steps To Kicking Off A New Software Project, contains some excellent information on how to start a new project. Some of the tips include things like:

* Creating the infastructure first
* Not creating frameworks right away
* and Walking the halls or visiting the developers.

Linux News has a brief article stating that VMware Offers Free Virtualization Server Software

bq. VMWare is making is VMWare Server application available for free in an attempt to gain share in the growing virtualization software market. Virtualization technology allows multiple virtual operating systems to run on a single physical machine while maintaining distinct hardware profiles.

This is definitely something that I have to try, just as soon as I get a more powerful server.

IBM Developer Works has an article on How to use Subversion with Eclipse

bq. From the beginning, Eclipse included tight integration with the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) in order to provide access to change-management capabilities. Now, many projects — notably those run by the Apache Software Foundation — are using a different change-management system: Subversion. Find out how to use Eclipse for projects that use a Subversion repository.