In Relation To

My name is Michael Simons, @rotnroll666 on Twitter.

I am a 37 year old developer living in Aachen, Germany. As such, I qualify at least age wise as a senior developer. I’ve been in the software industry for nearly 15 years now. I do have a technical apprenticeship and half finished degree in applied Mathematics. I never finished those studies as I landed in the company I still work with, ENERKO INFORMATIK.

Apart from being a husband and a father of two, I run our local JUG, the Euregio JUG.

I’m also a member of the NetBeans Dream Team.

We, at ENERKO INFORMATIK, create software in the energy and utility markets and work both in the technical and geographical parts as well as sales.

I did really database-centric software for at least 4 years and, I am still fluent in SQL and also PL/SQL. We once did XML processing inside Oracle databases, which works surprisingly well. After the slow death of Oracle Forms Client / Server, we migrated our desktop applications from 2004 onwards to Java Swing.

Around that time I played around with Hibernate for the first time. It seemed like the golden bullet back then to get table rows into objects. It wasn’t. But that I learned much later. As Gavin King said: „Just because you’re using Hibernate, doesn’t mean you have to use it for everything.“

Apart from „boring“ business application, I’ve been not only blogging for a long time but ran several online communities, one of them still alive. Daily Fratze is a daily photo project started in 2005 as a PHP application. Then, in 2006 became a Ruby on Rails site and by 2010, I started migrating it to a Spring and Hibernate backend.

Looking back at that code I notice how much I didn’t know about the purpose and intention of JPA / Hibernate. As it is true for a lot of stuff, you have to know your tools and the stuff they are designed for. Not all relations are meant to be materialized in objects, not all queries can be generated. And knowledge about when a Session is flushed and when not is essential. It’s not enough to know SQL to fully utilize Hibernate, but it’s also not enough to know Hibernate for abstracting persistence away. I changed the flaws in the site code, but you as the reader of this interview must not learn it the hard way, I really recommend Vlad Mihalcea's book High-Performance Java Persistence.

My biking project and the site and API of the Euregio JUG are my latest public projects that represent the stuff learned with the experience above. I use those projects as reference projects for my work.

Since several years, I mostly use NetBeans exclusively for all kind of software development. It supports me for plain Java, Spring, insanely well for JPA entities (build in checks for queries, coding style), for front-end (HTML as well as JavaScript). Most important, it has great integration for code quality related tools like JaCoCo, Sonar and more.

For Euregio JUG (source is on GitHub), I chose the following:

From my background, the data model has always been essential. I worked with awesome models and not so great ones. If you can map your domain to a data model, having a working domain driven design, Hibernate helps you a lot to materialize it back into Java.

We want to publish articles (posts) and events on the site. People should be able to register for those events, one time each. This fits perfectly into a simple and well understandable domain model that maps perfectly to objects and entities.

Why bother writing those plain SQL statements for selecting and updating stuff myself?

I chose the combination of Hibernate and Spring Data JPA for a reason: The domain I map in Hibernate facilitates all the „magic“ Spring Data JPA does: Generating queries, conditions and such: I hardly have to write anything myself.

If you chose JPA / Hibernate ORM in your project, I really recommend adding Spring Data JPA to the mix. Even if it’s a Java EE project. Spring Data JPA is a bit harder to configure there but provides the user with a lot of helpful stuff.

Using Hibernate Search integration was an experiment. I’m using it for a long time now on my daily photo project. With little effort, my entities provide access to a Lucene based index and I don’t have to fight with SOLR.

The EuregJUG site has no local storage in contrast to my daily photo project. So, I had to test drive the upcoming Elastic Search integration in 5.6.0, which works with the same set of annotations, the same entities but not against a local index but against a remote Elastic search index. You can see it in those commits described here and use it here.

It really isn’t much stuff added, it fits into the repository / DDD approach and matches my expectations.

Regarding Spring Boot, I’ve been doing Spring now for more than 7 years and Boot since early 2014. It has an awesome community and actually never disappointed me.

As a Hibernate user the most common problems I had during the time which I didn’t know exactly what I was doing: Having problems mapping my tables, slow queries and such. Also throwing Hibernate at problems that would have been a better fit for plain SQL caused problems. In both cases, those problems could be solved on my end.

The experience in Hibernates bug tracker is improving a lot lately and I would appreciate an even better integration with Spring Data JPA.

To close this, I have to say that I really like the stack mentioned above. We have reached a quality of component where you can really work well from a Domain Driven Design perspective, switch to SQL if needed and still having a clean architecture with clean, testable code. Problems that have been around 10 years ago most often gone.

It’s really not hard to get an application up and running, including unit and integration tests. If you leave aside the hypes, you can concentrate on both actual problems and on enabling people to learn and do their jobs.

I really like the fact that Hibernate Spatial find its way into ORM itself. If you have correctly mapped entities and you need to query them via spatial regions, that stuff is really helpful and works quite well. I’d appreciate more information there.