Thursday, February 20, 2003

Spring peeks in Almost suddenly, the days feel longer. The sun is in my eyes when I shower in the morning, and it won't be so dark when I pick up Jackson in 30 minutes. 4:47:28 PM

Hibernate Rocks I see this again and again, and appears to be why Hibernate has such high mindshare! Two hours ago I decided to learn how to use Hibernate. I just got a test app to run using Hibernate and I found it to be a shallow learning curve. Hibernate is already at the point where I eventually wanted DataBind to be. I guess this spells the end of DataBind which doesn't bother me one bit. :-) [All Things Java] 2:20:49 PM

Desktop Aggregator Roundup There's been a flood of activity in the desktop aggregator space of late, as everyone realizes that editing stuff inside browsers just sucks. Here's a roundup of desktop aggregators so far... Java NewsMonster HotSheet RSSView BottomFeeder Thingamablog Mac NetNewsWire iBlog Windows NewsDesk Syndirella FeedReeder NewzCrawler Aggie NovoBot I haven't reviewed hardly any of these yet, but that certainly is my intention. If you have experienced any of these, I would like to hear your thoughts. Also, if you hear of any other desktop news aggregators and weblog editors, send me a note! 12:21:19 PM

Webmonkey Blog hosted by Tripod Webmonkey Blog "We've decided that this here page will be the place to go when you want to find all of those interesting daily developments in the Web world, links to oddball sites, pictures of us horsing around, and basically anything that we want you to know about that we're too scared to put on the actual frontdoor of Webmonkey. To start (in a rather boring and self-serving way), have you seen the Tripod Blog Builder? It's what we've used to create this page, and it's easier to get started than you can possibly imagine. Well, don't take our word for it, just go and try it out yourself." [via Underway in Ireland] I find it interesting that Webmonkey is blogging now and that they're using Tripod's recently unveiled blogging software to do it. However, the first entry was on February 11, and there are only two other posts since then. Not too many daily develompents in the Web world? This is the first Tripod-based blog I've seen and, unfortunately, it looks like Tripod doesn't offer RSS feeds. [The Shifted Librarian] If true, then Tripod has missed the point entirely. Weblogs aren't interesting because they're easy to update, they're interesting because they stream! 10:23:24 AM

Castor links. I've been holding back on using Roller for two reasons: one is the lack of Metaweblog API, and the other is the choice of O/R technology. Nobody talks about Castor, and all the mindshare appears to be around Hybernate. I personally like Torque, and perhaps with the recent reorg of the db.apache.org site, it may get more exposure. Roller uses the Castor persistence framework. FreeRoller can be very slow. Are the two things related? I have no real empirical evidence (yet) to prove a link, but I did find an interesting link of a different sort in my referer logs this morning to a blog entry by (Roller user) Matthew Porter. Back in December 2002, Matthew chose Hibernate instead of Castor for the Java Lobby Community Port (JLCP) project. Here's why: Persistent Framework Choice for JLCP: Castor was not chosen for two primary reasons. The first is the lack of development of Castor in the past year. In addition, one the tests we performed at DMI, Castor was significantly slowerthan other PFs- to the point where it was intolerable. The first reason and recent tests led me to believe that the situation regarding speed had not changed. Also, an interesting link was posted in a comment on my Long Transactions post yesterday. This is a pretty interesting article: O/R Mapping with Castor JDO in the Real World: Castor holds up to its promises in simple testing and trial runs. However, it has proven to fall short in some practical issues with our application of about twenty-five data classes and as many tables. Most of our problems come from the need to hold onto objects across transactions and perform complex updates. I'm tempted to rewrite the Roller backend using Hibernate just for the hell of it, but I really should to do some profiling of Roller to see where the problem lies, don't you think? I guess I could do a 30-day eval of OptimizeIT or JProbe, but I would be happy to hear your recommendations for free and/or open source profiling tools. Got any? [Blogging Roller] I wish I had the bandwidth to offer my support! 9:51:06 AM