In Relation To

Thank you very much for inviting me here. My name is Jakub Kubryński (@jkubrynski on Twitter).

I live in Poland. I’ve been playing with programming since I was 7 years old.

My first language was Fortran 77, which was introduced to me by my dad, who is a researcher in aerodynamics. In 2004, I started my first regular job as a software developer, and since then I’ve stayed involved in this industry.

My career path has gone through Junior Developer to Architect, Team Leader, Development Manager and Trainer.

For the last 5 years, I’ve been working for my own company, Devskiller, where we’ve created a tool for testing technical skills of professional software developers and DevOps engineers, including practical knowledge of tools, libraries, and frameworks.

Apart from my main job at Devskiller, I try to give back some of my experience by training other developers.

During my professional career, I’ve already trained around 700 developers. Among other subjects, I give many trainings related to Java performance and JPA.

During those trainings, I’ve realized that many developers have problems with similar things. Those things are extremely important when working with JPA, so why not cover them in a conference talk to help more people than I can do during my trainings.

As we all know, the Golden Hammer does not exist. While Hibernate is still the most popular persistence technology in Java ecosystem, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one technology.

There are libraries such as jOOQ, which is a great addition to JPA for implementing CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) based systems (JPA for commands and jOOQ for queries).

We also, pretty often, decide to migrate the read model to non-relational databases like MongoDB.

I’m also curious how NewSQL databases (based on Google Spanner white paper) will change the situation. The goal is to get relational databases with performance and scalability similar to those of NoSQL engines.

Since NewSQL is still SQL-driven, we could probably get Hibernate to be their default interface to the Java world.

The biggest problem is that developers are trusting Hibernate so much that they don’t even check what queries are executed under the hood. In fact, both mappings and JPQL queries can be improved a lot by changing just a few lines of code like, for example, replacing java.util.List with java.util.Set, removing joining tables or adding fetch joins into queries.

There is also some serious incomprehension of the level-one cache behavior, which is especially important when doing batch processing.

Last but definitely not least, the problem is related to the Open Session in View anti-pattern. Allowing developers to ignore transactional boundaries can lead to serious performance issues after releasing the product into production.

At first, I want to congratulate you. Hibernate is one of the oldest (or the oldest?) and still alive open-source project related to Enterprise Java.

I think the moment you’ve joined the core team refreshed the spirit. I hope you’ll continue working on making Hibernate simpler for newbies - even just by discovering and logging common bad practices related to modeling entities.

Thank you, Jakub, for taking your time. It is a great honor to have you here. To reach Jakub, you can follow him on Twitter.