development

Here is a nice tutorial for Hibernate, a Java-based ORM (object-relational mapping) tool. In the last couple of years, I’ve been fairly removed from the database layer, as the applications I have worked on all had some kind of proprietary database abstraction layer, and most of my work was on the application layer above. It’s likely that I will get closer to the database layer again, and while I am still confident enough in my SQL and JDBC skills, I feel that an ORM tool such as Hibernate can save a lot of time in many cases....

Why hasn’t anybody thought of this before? If you’re a Java developer, I’m sure you’ve often run into class not found exceptions and had a hard time chasing down the missing JAR file. Jarhoo provides a simple search page that can identify the JAR file or package that corresponds to a particular class. Its growing database currently comprises 246344 classes, 2305 JAR files, and 25 applications. (via TheServerSide.com) It’s simple tools like Jarhoo and JDocs that can make a Java developer’s life much easier....

In the last few days, I have played a little with Subversion. I admit that I’m somewhat of a sucker for configuration management / version control systems. Up to now, I’ve had the opportunity to work with CVS, VSS, StarTeam, and Perforce (I’m not even counting RCS). Out of these tools, the only one I really dislike is VSS, as it its file-based (rather than true client-server) approach severly limits its scalability....

There appears to be some buzz about a technology called Laszlo right now. Laszlo is an XML-based scripting language that is compiled to Flash, and therefore provides a nice and easy way of writing Flash applications. Laszlo has just been made available as open source. Definitely worth a look. BoingBoing posting Discussion at Lambda the Ultimate Laszlo Homepage

IBM has published a series of articles that compare Eclipse to various other IDEs. The three articles are titled “Migrating to Eclipse…”, which makes it pretty clear that there is an obvious bias towards Eclipse. Nevertheless, if you are familiar with one of the other IDEs, this might be a worthwhile read. Eclipse vs. IntelliJ IDEA Eclipse vs. JBuilder Foundation Eclipse vs. Netbeans Personally, I’m still torn between IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse....