In Relation To

Now that the EJB 3.0 early draft is out there, it's definitely time to move on from all the recent politics, and start thinking about what we can actually /do/ with this stuff. EJB is the only Java standard which addresses server-side /business logic/, and is thus central to J2EE. The EJB spec committee recognizes that EJB has fallen short of achieving some of its ambitious goals, and is in need of an overhaul. This overhaul has focused very much upon ease of use, primarily via simplification of the requirements upon bean implementors. However, the spec committe also identified a number of critical functional enhancements that facilitate ease of use and the elimination of certain J2EE anti-patterns.

Another blogger, who will remain unmentionable, is upset that some of the guys at JBoss are beginning to throw the term AO around. According to him, the AOP community is just terribly attached to their P, and quite concerned that JBoss might be about to dominate the world with their P-less aspects.

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.