Real-World Experiences With Hibernate, from Shine Technologies, is an interesting article detailing one company’s experience using Hibernate and some of the problems and benefits they encountered.
I just found this list of funny “programming quotes”:http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Programming on Wikiquote. If you are a programming you should find most of them amusing. My favourites are:
* “Computer programming is tremendous fun. Like music, it is a skill that derives from an unknown blend of innate talent and constant practice. Like drawing, it can be shaped to a variety of ends – commercial, artistic, and pure entertainment. Programmers have a well-deserved reputation for working long hours but are rarely credited with being driven by creative fevers. Programmers talk about software development on weekends, vacations, and over meals not because they lack imagination, but because their imagination reveals worlds that others cannot see.” - Larry O’Brien and Bruce Eckel in Thinking in C#
* “Real Programmers never work 9 to 5. If they are around at 9 AM, it’s because they were up all night.”
“Digg.com”:http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/(Proprietary_software_)_Pay_a_little_now,_pay_a_lot_later has a story up right now with a link to an article discussing the benefits or evils of using proprietary software. The jist of the discussion is vendor lockin and the fact that we should use open source software and open standards. The interesting thing is that most of the discussion on digg is about the benefits of proprietary software and why businesses buy it.
From my own experience, whether the software is proprietary or FOSS, there is still vendor lockin. At work, we are creating an application using the “JBoss application server”:http://www.jboss.org. One of the problems that we face is that we can not port our app to another app server even though our app is based on an open standard–J2EE.
The problem though is, in addition to the vendor lockin, is that there is almost no documentation for JBoss and the community support is nill. And, no one in the organization is going to dig into the code to fix a bug. We are either going to work around it or wait for the next release and hope the bug has been fixed. We have done this with all the open source software we use (PostgreSQL, Red Hat, etc).
So what exactly is the benefit of using Free software?
Developer.com has an excellent article called Oracle XE: It’s Not Your Typical Oracle. The article details many of the improvements Oracle has made in their new Express Edition database that make it worth using in the SMB (Small to Medium Business) arena. Cheif amongst these is the new installer that makes installing Oracle XE on either Linux or Windows trivial. Based on “my experience”:http://www.fuzzylizard.com/archives/2005/12/14/671/, this statement is true. Personally, I think the best improvement is that it is free to deploy and distribute.
I am a geek and I exist in the of technology. Because of this, I have been hearing the battle cries of open source evangelists for the last many years. I have even joined in with at different times. Even now, I am the proud owner of an “open source project”:http://teamdocs.fuzzylizard.com on “Javaforge”:http://www.javaforge.com/proj/summary.do?proj_id=331.
However, I have one simple question: does the rest of the world even care?
I think sometimes you need to take a step back and see how big or small a minority your group really is. Are we geeks really just a small, annoying group advocating the use of open source or is the greater public really aware of this particular argument? My guess is that the vast majority of everyday people know nothing about open source.
Part of this thinking comes from a post on “digg.com”:http://www.digg.com about how to get people to “switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org”:http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/The_transition_away_from_Microsoftness. The comes reflect my personal experience: you can’t. People know Microsoft Office. That is what they are used to. That is what everyone else uses. And they don’t see the problem with having to pay for the software.
On the other hand, trying to convince someone that office software can be free can be almost impossible. Trust me, I have tried. It took me several years and I am still not sure that the intended party really understands the concept. Actually, I am not sure that I understand the concept.
One interesting statement that was made in the digg.com discussion was that most people, when it comes to some of the stuff that runs on their computers, such as the operating system, they don’t even realize that there is an operating system. To the regular user, there are two kinds of computers in the world: a Windows computer, and a Mac computer. They don’t realize that they are buying hardware running an operating system, to them the OS is the computer.
Apply this idea a little further and it is easy to come to the conclusion that the battle over open source is only being fought by geeks and no one else really cares.
I don’t do a lot of web development anymore, but one thing that has caught my eye is the “Yahoo! User Interface Library–YUI”:http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/. “Vitamin”:http://www.thinkvitamin.com is running an excellent article that showcases 15 Things you can do with Yahoo! UI. The article starts off by introducing YUI and then shows some of the very cool animations and affects that can be achieved by using it. For anyone who is thinking of incorporating some cool DOM/DHTML effects into their next web app, this article is definitely worth checking out.
I have spent most of the afternoon battling various “Hibernate”:http://www.hibernate.org or “c3p0″:http://www.mchange.com/projects/c3p0/index.html errors. The biggest was with c3p0.
I wanted to change my application over from using Hibernate’s JDBC connection pooling (which is not for production) to using c3p0. So I added the correct lines to my Hibernate.cfg.xml file and everything broke. I have a JUnit test set up for testing my PersistenceDao class against a real database and not a single test was passing. The problem was that once it came time to run my tests, Hibernate could not open any connections.
I searched Google and found nothing usefull. In the end the solution came from playing around with the config file. I commented out the following line:
update
And all of my tests started to pass. Cool. I just wish I understand why that one line made such a difference. I am expecting that I will have problems with this down the road. The solution cannot be that simple.
Now the problem that I am trying to fix is that when I run app in Tomcat, the lazy loading isn’t working. The error message keeps saying that it can’t create a proxy, even though I have lazy loading turned off. It should be eagerly fetching all of my collections, but it ain’t. Time to check Google again.
