rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Saturday, 12 October 2002

Carlos is wondering if OFBiz is turning OO on its Head or Programming in the Large? JIRA provides good validation for the Entity Engine (don't know what else it uses in the OFBiz project). Ack! I think we are a validation that the EE works for us - as usual, YMMV. We only use the Entity Engine mind you. OFBiz as a whole is a much larger project, to develop and entire commerce platform really. I hear that there are quite a number of sites running on the entire OFBiz framework now which is great! Have they gone mad? What's going on here? After all these years of moving away from Relational models to OO models, these guys have gone full circle. Could the be on to something? Let's think for a moment here, when we build webapps, using a framework like Struts or Webwork, we see things called Actions, in fact its not just for webapps, you find them in Swing too? What are Actions? Actions are functions in the form of an object. Could we just not have just had plain functions as first class objects? Are Actions the same thing as functions, so like what the OFBiz guys say, there are only Services and Entities. Just like what a C guy would say, there are only functions and data structures. I still don't really understand what Carlos means here by 'programming in the large'. OFBiz works wonderfully because it is not another OR framework (yes, there are no data related objects per se - there is one generic 'data holder' style object). It is what we have internally called a liberal framework. It enables you to very rapidly build new entities, migrate your data model, add attributes etc - all in a few XML files, without any code generation step. Main draw back? You lose type safety at compile time - so woe betide you if you don't have a good testing framework. (But you have a full unit test suite already anyway right? ) This is a minor draw back IMHO (again - I must stress this is for our application's needs - YMMV) and it does open up some nifty new things you can do... especially when combined with other equally liberal frameworks like... WebWork! For example you can write a single JSP fragment which understands (using ww tags and the ww expression language) how to display and link an entity. You can then pass any entity to that fragment (whether it represents an issue, a project or a comment is irrelevant) because all entities are GenericValues. This is very, very cool. 1:56:52 PM  comment []      It would appear that Brett is in Big Trouble for sparking an idea analagous to java.blogs - girlfriends.slash.significant.others.of.bloggers.blogs. I shall be informing she who must be obeyed my wonderful girlfriend that she needs to contact you pronto. :-) I am suddenly having visions that this is going to turn in to something like the java.blogs version of http://www.pickupyourowndamnsocks.com/ arghhhhhhhhhh :-) 1:47:05 PM  comment []      Late night ramblings.... I sorta mentioned my new server setup in passing before, but I'm using OrionServer again and I love it. I was thinking about slapping a hacked copy of Weblogic on the server so I can work and play in the same environment, but Orion is just so nice I decided to play nice. Russ is using Orion - great! It really is a kickass server. FYI we run all our Orion instances in production using Daemontools which is a really cool 'services' style system for *ixes. I am really digging Wired's new XHTML designed site. I really need to take another look at this site from design, technology and usability angles - I really like the idea of being XHTML. (By the way, having worked for TerraLycos, and not leaving with a great impression, it's nice to see that they are letting sites like Wired do their own thing still, even though they've slapped that branding bar across the top.) Ditto! Some of the design elements are wickedly cool - and looking at the HTML source impressed me more. There are no tables on the frontpage! Holy crap Batman, that's amazing! I wonder how it looks in NS4? I just opened it up on NS4 on my Linux gateway machine - hahah - it looks like the old school web man! Grey background, and a long long page of text. 1:43:37 PM  comment []      Patently rediculous. CNet: IBM flushes restroom patent. [Hack the Planet] How much more proof do you need that the patent system is sh*t? ;) [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla] ahhahah this is a classic article! The computing giant received a patent for a "system and method for providing reservations for restroom use" in December. But the company later decided to renounce all of its patent claims after a petition was made against it, according to documents released this week by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. I wonder what wacky shit I can come up with and patent. How about a "system for organising queued, persistent persons awaiting entry into a drinking venue" (aka the 'red velvet rope system')? I'm sure I could make some money off that. IBM joke: Did you know that IBM so heavily promotes working from home now, it has renamed itself IBM - I'm By Myself? 1:35:46 PM  comment []      BEA rejects acquisition prediction. Analyst report speculates app server maker to be bought by larger vendor [InfoWorld: Top News] Apparently BEA isn't for sale. I wonder how they would price it? $100,000 per employee? 1:20:02 PM  comment []      hsqldb startup slow?!.. Sure, use hsqldb for development. My point was, I wouldn't trust it as a long term database. Even using just a few megs of data over time could involve millions of SQL statements. You're startup time will just get slower and slower over time as the number of statements to execute on startup increases. Sure tens of thousands is pretty fast (since its all in RAM afterall) but try it with hundreds of millions of SQL statements evaluated after a large amount of continual use. Try use 1Gb of continually updating data over a long period of time. OK - just to clear this up in case anyone else thinks I've had a moment of insanity - I'm not suggesting you replace your Oracle installation with hsqldb for your million record data warehouse! 11:17:29 AM  comment []      Now Anthony has a cool idea here - customising his pages for each incoming search keyword - which Google will then index. Google-Recursion? Search keyword referrer personalisation. Its running on my pictures, media and weblog sections, the page detects if the visitor is coming from Google, extracts the keywords they entered into Google, and then performs a query across all the content records in my site, returning up to 30 relevance ranked related pages on my site. 11:08:33 AM  comment []      Apparently Mr Stevens is now so famous he has his own "Excuse for being an asshole" page. Amusing! 10:55:08 AM  comment []