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Someone sort of complained about the fact that my Blog is starting to look like a resume. Maybe he’s right, but I didn’t really intend it to be…

This post however is about another training I attended today. The training could however be the start of a some better, and more useful posts. Most trainings I had in the past covered technical topics; mostly facts, tips and tricks. This training was different. It covered a more social topic: writing reports (actually writing in general).

I think I learned a lot today, and hopefully the my upcoming article on the Finalist blog will underline this.

A couple of weeks ago the zipper of my Samsonite laptop bag broke. Could happen you would think. Well, it could.. but something similar happened last year to the bag before. Luckily Samsonite replaced my bag again, for the third time, and offered me another two years of warranty. Did I find my way into a lifetime of Samsonite bags?

During the course last week Christian already mentioned the upcoming ‘Horizontal Partitioning’ extension for Hibernate. What he didn’t mention was that it would be donated by Google!

Yesterday the Hibernate site displayed a new toplevel module called Shards. Shards offers critical data clustering and support for horizontal partitioning (also called sharding) to Hibernate. Cool… what does it do?

Now, customers can keep their data in more than one relational database for whatever reason-too much data or to isolate certain datasets, for instance-without added complexity when building and managing applications. Hibernate Shards is designed to encapsulate and reduce the complexity of building applications that work with sharded datasets.

Ah, support for distributing data across different databases. Since there is no production release of it yet it is probably not ready for real use; but I’d really like to try this…!!

Oh, and… thanks Google!

I came across this demonstration video of Adobe’s new crossplatform runtime:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/videos/apollo_demo07/index.html

Most of the stuff has been possible using Java Webstart for a couple of years now, but somehow I’ve got the feeling the people at Adobe are so fare ahead in the marketing department that Appolo won’t have any problems surpassing Java Webstart at all.

A fancy video presentation like this just makes the whole concept clear to people actually making decisions, instead of the developers and programmers building them.

Technically I do however think that abandoning the operating system’s user interface guidelines is a bad idea. Coming from the less standardized world of Linux (motif / gtk / kde / gnome / xfce / java / QT) I have to say that having interface coherence (like OSX and Windows offer) is really important; if it is done right.

On the other hand, the web as we know it just screams for next generation of technology; all this CSS and Ajax stuff with it’s browser issues and kludgy layouting is just getting stretched beyond it’s limits.

By the way, didn’t anyone else find the resemblance between a ‘crossplatform runtime’ and something we call a ‘browser’ remarkable?

We’re back online! Average speed seems to be around the 8/1 , which is far under the max of 20… but still much faster then the previous connection… and much cheaper

Pricewise our old and trusted Demon ADSL was getting a bit old. The 4/1 mbit line was quite a bit more expensive then most of the current 20/1 mbit connections; and with the new types of VOIP based plans we don’t need a separate telephone account anymore.

So today was going to be the day that our account would be switched to a brand new Orange account. Well, as always shutting down the old account seems to have worked. Enabling the new account seems to be problematic; the guy at the helpdesk assured me it would probably been done tonight…. or maybe tomorrow morning.

Bummer.

For know I’m using the WIFI accesspoints of one of my neighbours (thank you, AP_32e5a9), but hopefully this misery will end soon…

Today the training continued, full speed ahead. We covered some really handy topics like:

• Queries, Criteria API, Filters
• Application design with Hibernate
• Performance tuning
• Deployment
• Caching

I found it quite usefull to have an in-depth view on the way the second level cache (and thus query cache) work. Application design was primarely focussed on using EJB3 for what we call the service tier; the Hibernate guys REALLY don’t like Spring.

I put forward some of the concepts we used in the current model, and the primary advice was: don’t go wild on inheritance… it will be far more difficult to tune for good performance then a ‘flatter’ model would. Instead of using a persistent supertype Chris would prefer to use interfaces and a composite object holding the shared values; much easier to use… I have to think about that.

Today was the first day of the two-day Hibernate Advanced (H267) training which I’m attending. Most of the stuff discussed isn’t new to me, but hearing explanations of certain side effects by one of the Hibernate gurus (Christian Bauer, (co)author of Java Persistence with Hibernate and Hibernate in Action) is actually a really nice way of deepening my Hibernate knowledge.

Today we covered the following topics:

• Advance class and property mappings
• Associations and collections
• Transactional processing
• Cascading
• The hibernate session
• Exception handling

After the session I asked how the ‘association oddity’ I recently blogged about was to be seen. After looking at the query I presented Christian explained that I was doing something quite horrible (as to be expected ). The result of that specific query would be a cartesian (every row of each table is joined to every row in the other table) join
of the tables mentioned in the join clause. A small test which I wrote seems to confirm this. It doesn’t however explain how this could deliver better performance. I’ll have to look into the resultset of the generated query to be 100% sure.

Another interesting aspect of todays training was the fact that Christian really doesn’t seam to see any reason to use Spring AT ALL. I partially agree about the remarks he made on the amount of XML coming with Spring, and the fact that Spring swallows the exceptions thrown by Hibernate. I do however still really the way Spring helps developers in building a loosely coupled system.

Tomorrow we’ll be going in-depth on various topics like fetching strategies, versioning, performance tuning and caching … can’t wait! And oh, we’ll surely see some Seam magic tomorrow.

Today I passed the JBB Spring Core exam. It cost me 50 contribution points, and took me almost 90 minutes…. one of the most difficult exams I took. So I’m actually pleased with a score of 70% this time

Successful

Result id: #90188		Spring Core
Peter Maas		+9
2007-03-09 10:04		+50
81 minutes and 15 seconds ( 85 minutes and 30 secondsmax)

The last couple of months there was a lot of buzz about Second Live. Personally I don’t really like the type of game; I like to do something competitive. I do think however that people a looking for new ways to meet and interact with each other.

Sony must have thought the same, the new Playstation comes with a build-in ‘online world’ which is conceptually quite similar to second live… but is way ahead of it visually. A big difference is that buying a game also adds inventory (clothes, posters) to your avatar, which might help in identifying people playing the same games. Another feature which is quite attractive is the possibility to join multiplayer games; and we’re talking REAL games here.

The movie ends with talk about ’sponsored spaces’ … how many of these online worlds will we have? In which online world should your company sponsor a space….? Will these worlds be connected in so we can move to the next level of the ‘internet’?