In Relation To

Hi Vlad, I’m Julien Dubois, and I’ve been a software developer for the last 20 years, mainly focusing on Java and Web development.

I’m involved in the Open Source and Java communities: I’ve written a book on the Spring Framework, contributed to many different OSS projects, and talked at a lot of conferences.

Currently, I’m Chief Innovation Officer at Ippon Technologies, a Java consultancy with offices in France, the US and Australia. I’m also the CTO of DataMC, a VC-backed startup specialized in Big Data solutions.

It’s all about having a great developer experience: we integrate a lot of cool technologies like Spring Boot, Hibernate, AngularJS and Docker, and automate all the tasks you would usually do manually. In the end, you win a lot of time, and your project has a much higher quality.

We, of course, have great Hibernate support, and even have an online IDE to help generate complex data models.

Another great thing is that we have a huge community, with lots of people and companies contributing. This ensures we have tons of ideas, patches and best practices, which is something nobody could ever achieve alone.

At Ippon Technologies, I have seen many projects, probably more than 50 in the last 5 years. I’d say 80% of people use JPA and Hibernate together, and the rest have either some custom JDBC code, a proprietary framework (like Jalo, which comes with Hybris), or an Open Source alternative (like MyBatis).

But I haven’t seen anyone using another JPA provider for a very long time. A couple of years ago, I saw one project which wanted to test Batoo JPA, but that implementation is not maintained anymore.

So, for JHipster, we use Hibernate because it’s the most widely-used, better-maintained implementation, and also because I trust Red Hat to be a great sponsor for the project.

My main issue with Hibernate on JHipster is the startup time. On my laptop, I need 10 seconds to start a Hibernate application, compared to 7 seconds for a MongoDB application. All this time isn’t caused by Hibernate itself, as there are also the connection pool and the 2nd-level cache to start, but the whole stack is a bit heavy when coding.

In production mode, we also need something that starts up really fast, and that’s definitely the biggest issue for me. For instance, when using microservices with Docker, or when using cloud providers like Heroku or Cloud Foundry, this really goes against Disposability (the number 9 of the 12 factors).

So I’m wondering if we could have an option where Hibernate starts quickly without doing any check, and then fails fast on any error, like an incorrectly-written query.