A Java geek

No more Hibernate? Really?

I recently stumbled upon this punchy one-liner: No More Hibernate!. At first, I couldn’t believe what I read. Then, scrolling down, I noticed that the site was linked to jOOQ, a framework that advocates for SQL to have a first-class status in Java: SQL was never meant to be abstracted. To be confined in the narrow boundaries of heavy mappers, hiding the beauty and simplicity of relational data. SQL was never meant to be object-oriented.

Development

On the merits of verbosity and the flaws of expressiveness

Java is too verbose! Who didn’t stumble on such a rant on the Internet previously? And the guy bragging about [Insert expressive language there], that which soon replace Java because it is much more concise: it can replace those 10 lines of Java code with a one-liner. Ah, the power! Unfortunately, in order to correlate conciseness with power (and verbosity with lack of power), those people take many shortcuts that once put into perspective make no sense at all.

Event

Happy summer holidays

The time of the year has come for me to go on holidays. For two weeks, no technology watching, no tech post reading, no blogging, no coding and most important of all, no computer at all. If you belong to the group of people who already spent their holidays - or even worse, to those who do not have vacations, rejoice (or not)!

Book

The Leprechauns of Software Engineering

This review is about The Leprechauns of Software Engineering by Laurent Bossavit, self-published Leanpub. Facts 13 chapters, $5 minimum, $10 suggestedThe book is about many things we all take for granted in software engineering, and that have no reliable underlying scientific basis Pros and cons This is not your average tech book, nor your average methodology book. As such, it cannot be reviewed through the pros/cons prism.

Java

Stop the f... about Gradle

There was a 'Moved Permanently' error fetching URL: 'https://twitter.com/nicolas_frankel/status/357158512205373440' This was my week’s hate, and I take full responsibility for every character in it. While that may seem like a troll, Twitter is not really the place to have a good-natured debate with factual arguments, so here is the follow up. Before going into full-blown rhetoric mode, let me first say that despite popular belief, I’m open to shiny new things.

Development

You should check AngularJS...

... even if you’re a server-side guy! It is not because I’m a big Vaadin fan that I’m completely rejecting other technologies even before trying them. In this regard, I must stay I’ve been strongly impressed by the AngularJS talk at Devoxx France 2013.

Java

Maven between different environments

As a consultant, I find myself in different environments in need of different configurations. One such configuration is about the Maven settings file. This file is very important, for it governs such things as servers, mirrors and proxies. When you have a laptop, switching from customer configuration to home configuration and vice versa when you change place quickly becomes a bore. When you have to handle more than one customer, it escalates a nightmarish and tangled configuration mess.

JavaEE

Spring 3.2 sweetness

Even the most extreme Spring opponents have to admit it is all about making developers life easier. Version 3.2 of Spring MVC brings even more sweetness to the table. Sweetness #1: No web.xml The ability to run a webapp without any web deployment descriptor comes from Servlet 3.0. One option would be to annotate your servlet with the @WebServlet annotation to set mapping and complementary data.

Technical

Writing a tech book: why and how?

There are a couple of reasons that could motivate you to write a tech book. Money shouldn’t be one of them. You don’t get rich, period First things first, you don’t write a technical book to become rich as you need the lower time to revenue ratio possible. In this regard, technical book writing is one on the worst possible example: It is a very time consuming activity.

Nicolas Fränkel's blog