In this post, I’d like you to meet Simon Martinelli, who, among many other things, is teaching Java EE and JPA at the University of Applied Sciences in Berne.
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Hi, Simon. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your developer experience?
I’m a software architect, developer, and trainer from Switzerland working for simas GmbH. Besides that, I’m a lecturer for Java EE, architecture and design and persistence technologies at the University of Applied Sciences in Berne. In my spare time, I’m working on some open source projects and as I’m an expert group member of JSR 352 Batch and JSR 354 Money and Currency API.
I started my IT career in 1995 as a Cobol developer on IBM mainframe. Since 2000, I’ve been working in many enterprise projects as a developer, architect, and technical lead, using J2EE/Java EE, Spring framework, and from time to time .NET. My first contact with OR-Mapping was in 2000 when we used TopLink in a project for Swiss Railways.
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You have an open-source project on GitHub called Query Language Result Mapper. Can you tell us what’s the goal of this framework?
I love the JPA constructor expression. In my opinion, it’s the best way to get around the common performance problems when using JPA in a naive way. But the constructor expression only works with JPQL or Criteria API and sometimes you need to execute a SQL query but don’t want to use a fully featured SQL framework like jOOQ.
Sure, JPA comes with the ConstructorResult but I find it too complicated, and it was not available with JPA 1.0. Hibernate has the
ResultTransformer, but this only works with Hibernate. So I decided to start Query Language Result Mapper (QLRM).QLRM simply tries to find a matching constructor based on a JPA native query result or, when using plain JDBC, a JDBC
ResultSet. It’s simple, small and not related to a specific JPA implementation. -
You are also teaching Java EE and Java Persistence API at the University of Applied Science in Berne. Is JPA easy to learn? What do your students think of this Java Persistence standard?
JPA is by far the most complicated part of Java EE to learn. Because it’s leaky abstraction, you have to know a lot about SQL databases and what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s also the most common source of performance problems. While teaching, I always try to focus on how to avoid these performance problems.
My students usually like JPA because it makes data access much easier. For those who don’t know the history of OR-Mapping, it’s hard to understand that the JPA implementation behaves differently in some situations. What they don’t like is that (currently) JPA does not support the Java 8 Date Time API.
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Since I started blogging, I realized that explaining a subject helps me better understand it. Do you think all developers should be involved in teaching or writing articles or books about the subjects they want to master?
Absolutely! I’m teaching JPA since 2007, and this forces me to get a deep understanding of the topic because the questions of the students can be very challenging. Sometimes I even have to look at the code of the JPA implementation to understand what happens under the hood. In return, this know-how helps me to write better and faster applications.
As Albert Einstein said: "If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough."
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We always value feedback from our users, so can you tell us what you’d like us to improve or are there features that we should add support for?
I think the whole Hibernate team is doing a great job! It’s more than feature-complete (it’s hard to know every feature, though).
Just one minor thing: When reading the documentation it’s often hard to differentiate what’s JPA standard and what’s Hibernate specific. But I don’t think that this is very important because not many developers are switching the JPA implementation in a project.
Thank you, Simon, for taking your time. It is a great honor to have you here. To reach Simon, you can follow him on Twitter.
