In Relation To

I finally got the comments from our Hibernate in Action reviewers back, so it's time to give everyone an update on the current state. First, thanks to all of you guys for your feedback. We really appreciate the many hours you spent reading and commenting on the book. As one of you said: A good book is only possible with excellent reviewers.

I've posted the slides for two recent presentations.

Recently, we've started to hear complaints that we don't put enough effort into free support in the Hibernate forums. This really kinda hurts, since everyone /used/ to comment that we gave such /great/ support, and since I still spend hours most days reading and responding to forum posts. I don't get paid for this, and I rarely get thanked for it either (even by the people I do get time to respond to). I've been doing this for almost three years now.

Hibernate is great at representing strongly-typed, static object models. Not all applications are like this. Metadata-driven applications define entity type information in the database. Both the object model and the relational model support dynamic addition of new types, and perhaps even redefinition of existing types. Actually, most complex applications contain a mix of both static models and dynamic models.

This is /just great/ ...

We've seen a few people using internationalized reference data where labels displayed in the user interface depend upon the user's language. It's not immediately obvious how to deal with this in Hibernate, and I've been meaning to write up my preferred solution for a while now.

I've seen three or four ORM tool comparisons in the last three weeks; on some weblogs, on our forum and I've even been part in several decisions.

Recently, I helped one of our customers migrating a legacy database to Hibernate; one of the more interesting topics was versioning and audit logging. Actually, in the last couple of months, the subject of historical data came up several times. No matter if it was a legacy SQL schema or a migration from a broken object-oriented database, everyone had their own way to log data changes.

Abe White of Solarmetric replies to my criticisms of JDO on TSS. I'm actually not interested in getting into a lengthy debate over this, but since there /was/ an error in my first post, I must certainly acknowledge that.

Yesterday, Linda DeMichiel announced the changes coming in EJB 3.0. There was a lot to digest in her presentation, and I think it will take a while for people to figure out the full implications of the new spec. So far, most attention has focused upon the redesign of entity beans, but that is most certainly not all that is new! The expert group has embraced annotations aggressively, finally eliminating deployment descriptor XML hell. Taking a leaf from Avalon, Pico, Spring, Hivemind, etc, EJB will use dependency injection as an alternative to JNDI lookups. Session beans will be POJOs, with a business interface, home objects have been eliminated. Along with various other changes, this means that EJB 3.0 will be a much more appropriate solution for web-based applications with servlets and business logic colocated in the same process (which is by far the most sane deployment topology for most - but not all - applications), without losing the ability to handle more complex distributed physical architectures.