In Relation To

Now that the dust is starting to settle from JavaOne it is time to explain what the announcement from JBoss about joining and endorsing NetBeans means in context of Hibernate Tools.

No /Hibernate in Action/ anymore. It has been a while since my last update on the book status, so here is a heads up. A lot of things happened in the past three months:

The recently finalized Java EE 5 platform dramatically simplifies development of Java applications.

I've seen a couple of comments online to the effect that Seam is some kind of JBoss-only thing. This is not the case, Seam doesn't have any hard dependencies to anything other than the standard Java EE 5 APIs.

Hibernate Tools 3.1.0.beta5 (http://tools.hibernate.org) have been made available.

I, for one, welcome our new penguin overlords.

Recently, Simon Brown put together a set of requirements for a very simple blogger application that could be used to compare Java web frameworks. I have my reservations about the actual requirememts he put together (in particular, there is no form submission!) but since some other framework authors have bitten, I've gone ahead and ported the example to Seam. I want to put a massive caveat around this post: Seam is absolutely not designed for applications like blogs or web forums; these kind of problems are very easy to solve using something like PHP or Ruby on Rails and there is no really good reason to use Java for a problem like this (unless Java is all you know). We have a set of requirements here with /no conversations/ and /no business processes/, so all the sophisticated state management machinery of Seam is redundant. Nevertheless, frameworks need to make simple things easy, and you'll see how little Java code we need to write to solve this simple problem using Seam.

People using the Criteria API have either transparently or knowingly used a ResultTransformer . A ResultTransformer is a nice and simple interface that allows you to transform any Criteria result element. E.g. you can make any Criteria result be returned as a java.util.Map or as a non-entity Bean.

Moving Hibernate source code to our new Subversion home is done. Both developer and annonymous access have been set up. Currently, web access is only available via the Apache module which is less than ideal. We have been told that either Fisheye or ViewCVS access over the Subversion repsoitory will be setup soon.