In Relation To

As predictable as fog in San Francisco, every couple of months we are unsurprised to see yet another announcement by some company or open source group who has solved the complexity of Object Relational Mapping (ORM) by eliminating the relational database. Great leaps in developer productivity are promised, together with astonishing performance increments, usually in the realm of two or three orders of magnitude compared to existing technology. What is most amazing about this is that so many different groups seem to have achieved such breathtaking advances entirely independently of each other and yet, paradoxically, enterprise adoption of these technologies remains approximately zero. What's going on here? Is the all-powerful Oracle Corporation secretly blackmailing all CIOs in America? Well, let's try to understand this paradox better by taking a closer look at the claimed benefits of these systems.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 9:30, Bob Lee and I will talk about the work in progress on JSR-299. Over the last couple of months, we've been working with the rest of the Web Beans expert group to create a component model that combines the best of Seam, Juice, JSF and EJB 3.0. The end goal is the definitive programming model for business logic components in Java, combining Seam's state management with Guice's typesafety.

With the new Groovy 1.1 beta out and its support for Java 5 annotations, wouldn't it be great to be able to write Seam applications in Groovy? Indeed it is great and you can do that with JBoss Seam (in CVS HEAD at the time of writing).

Hibernate and JBoss Seam will be covered by some of the JBoss folks at JavaOne.

Over the last year or so, we've been thinking hard about what kind of new functionality we want to see in the next rev of the EE platform, and feeding our ideas to Sun to incorporate into the JSR proposals for the next round of EE specifications. These JSRs should become public fairly soon now, but I wanted to give a rundown on the things that are important to me, and why I think they're important. A lot of these items have come out of our experience with Seam, others have been things that have been missing from the platform for a long time. My wishlist is pretty long, so I'm going to spread it over several posts. First up, I'll talk about session beans.

It's fun to compare the historical download numbers of my new project with the last project I worked on . Until recently, they had been tracking pretty much level - Seam downloads had been growing slightly slower than Hibernate downloads did, about one month behind. But recently, the downloads jumped up, and Seam after 18 months is now where Hibernate was after almost 2 years. So, for now, we are doing better than Hibernate did.

Norman released 1.2.1 yesterday. Have you ever wished you could have the same edit/test cycle in Java that people in the PHP, Ruby or Grails communities take for granted? I mean, the ability to edit a Java class or XHTML page in your editor, and then see the result immediately, just by clicking refresh in your browser? Well, now you can. The easiest way to try out this new feature is to create a WAR project using seam-gen, and start coding - it's wicked fun.

I am glad that Genuitec finally made their changes to Hibernate Tools publicly available at their open source resources page. That is all that I/we ever asked for.

Wow, amazing how quickly my last blog entry got results! Since I posted it, it appears that Genuitec have decided to comply with the LGPL and provide their modifications to Hibernate tools in source form: