SourceForge's Release Process Sucks

Dave asked earlier today if we should move Roller to be hosted at java.net rather than sourceforge.net. I responded with "SourceForge works for me" and didn't see any reason for a move. But after dealing with trying to release 0.8 of appfuse all night, I'm ready for something better. The release process sucks. I have to FTP files to upload.sourceforge.net (anonymously) and then, when the files are completed, selected them as files to release through the web UI.

The problem is that I've been trying to upload for the last 24 hours, and it keeps failing at different points in the upload process. So, here's the worst part - you can't "delete" from the FTP site - you have to release the file, and then delete it. What a pain in the ass - I've done this about 10 times now. My XP machine seems to be the source of my ftp-connection-dropping problem, so I've moved over to my Linux box. So now I'm ready to upload all my files, and look what SF gives me:

We're Sorry.
The SourceForge.net Website is currently down for maintenance.
We will be back shortly

Fuckers.

[Hibernate] Open Session in View Pattern

I get this question a lot when folks check out my struts-resume application - so I figured I'd document it here - and then I can just send future developers a URL. The question is this:

Why do you tie your View to your Model Implementation by putting a Hibernate Session in your Service Interfaces?

I have a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I initially had ses.currentSession() and ses.closeSession() at the beginning and end of each DAO method. In fact, I found this old e-mail where you can see an example. This seemed to work for me and I was happy with it. However, I got an e-mail from Gavin (Hibernate's Lead Developer) that I was doing it all wrong. He said that I should use one session per request, rather than one on each method. Why? For performance reasons and to allow rolling back the entire session, rather than just a method. At least that's why I remember him saying.

So I refactored and implemented the Open Session in View pattern in conjunction with the Thread Local Session. You can checkout my ActionFilter and ServiceLocator for the View and ThreadLocal, respectively.

The problem now is that I pass my the Session object from my View -> Business Layer [example: UserManager] -> DAO Layer. So I'm tightly coupled with Hibernate, which I don't mind, because I really, really like Hibernate and have no plans to implement an alternate DAO (even though the architecture allows it). Even if I did choose to implement a new plain ol' JDBC DAO Layer, I can always get a java.sql.Connection from the Session using ses.connection(). Another option I've thought of is to just pass the ServiceLocator between the different layers, and call ses.currentSession() or ses.connection() when it's needed. But that seems to be the same thing I was doing before when I was opening/closing at the method level.

Comments and suggestions, as always, are welcomed and encouraged.

RE: java.net's weblogs

Mike Clark does a little to answer my earlier questions regarding java.net's weblogs.

In addition to this personal blog, I'm also writing a blog on java.net, unveiled today at the opening of JavaOne.

How to maintain two blogs? Duplication is icky. So frankly, I'm not sure how this will work out yet. There will be entries on this blog that aren't relevant to the java.net audience, and vice versa. Javaish things are a subset of the entries on my personal blog. At any given time I'm fiddling with multiple languages and tools. I may actually post all blog entries here, then copy relevant entries to the java.net space. Better yet, I suspect that eventually java.net will be able to automatically slurp specific RSS category feed.

What I do know is that this will be my primary blog. If I write something on java.net, I'll let ya'll know. You can also snag my java.net RSS feed just to keep me honest.

Hmmm, java.net's weblogs seem to have some pretty good authors. They get a real big thumps up from me now that I see they have a Native Montanan blogging there!

Update: More good answers were left in a comment by James:

Some answers to your questions on both the Java.net site and on my blog.

Just the answers I wanted to hear I might add!

RE: Java Java Java

From the other Matt:

I dig the java.com site - the layout/look is very cool IMO. Christina must be making a bundle from Sun, eh?

java.net's weblogs

So Java.net has weblogs. Boring ones I suspect. Why? Because this seems to be a "corporate" portal and I doubt that these folks are going to wite about how cool their kids are or how nice their mountain bike ride was (a.k.a. stuff that's interesting). But that's the nature of weblogs - some are good, some aren't. Let me qualify that by saying that some weblogs are interesting to me, and some aren't.

After writing this, I did a little investigating and there are some good bloggers over there (James Duncan Davidson, RSS). There are a couple questions I have. Is the content moderated? Can these bloggers speak their true feelings (can they cuss) - or will Sun remove their posting. Secondly, will they maintain this as their primary blog, or will personal ones continue to be updated. Are we enterering the world of your work blog and your home blog?

Truth is, I probably won't even read them unless they get an RSS feed for all new postings like java.blogs has. I gotta agree with Mike, I'm not changing any bookmarks. But I would like to be convinced otherwise. Hey, at least they're trying - you gotta give them credit for that.

RE: JavaOne 2003 Blogs

I might as well mirror this list from the great Cactus guru Vincent Massol.

Here are some persons that will be blogging from JavaOne 2003

• http://www.simongbrown.com/blog/index.jsp
• http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/113
• http://www.eugenebelyaev.com/begblog
• http://blog.fuzzymagic.com/blog/page/sean
• http://alan.blog-city.com/index.cfm
• http://212.100.191.199/blog/page/werner
• http://blog.troublescope.org/blojsom/blog
• http://linuxintegrators.com/hl30/blog
• http://www.freeroller.net/page/cpurdy
• http://www.drunkandretired.com
• http://www.freeroller.net/page/cbeust
• http://www.webmink.net/minkblog.htm

Update: I added a link in the top-left for JavaOne Blogs. I will continue to add to this list as I find them.

Update 2: You can also checkout the webcasts.

Apple G5s - 1.8 MHz

From Slashdot (via Erik of course):

Apple Insider is reporting that Apple will announce computers based on IBM's 64 bit PPC 970 processor in the upcomming WWDC and will market them as G5. The new Power Mac G5s will sport a completely new motherboard design utilizing DDR 400 RAM as well as AGP 8x graphics, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0, sources said. "In the box" connectivity among the news systems is based on Hypertransport which provides 64-bit addressing and will replace Apple's multilevel bus architecture found in current systems. Initial offerings of the Power Mac G5 are said to boast 1.4 to 1.8GHz, single core PPC 970 processors, with the possibility of a dual 1.8GHz chips shortly thereafter.

Sounds good, but how long will those processors take to put in the PowerBooks? My advise - just go Intel - you'll get more customers and it'll be faster! How sweet would it be to buy a new Dell laptop and be able to run Windows, Linux and OS X on the same machine?! That would rock - and I'm willing to bet you'd get a lot of folks buying OS X. But then again, OS X is cheap - it's Apple's hardware that's spendy and it's probably a good revenue driver for them.

Out-of-the-Box - My Review

It figures, after bitching about the lack of ROI for Developers on Open Source projects, I get an e-mail from Rob Cope of Out-of-the-Box. The e-mail said that I could get a free version of Out-of-the-Box Enterprise Edition for my contribution to the open source community.

So I think, "wicked cool" - this software sounds great! I downloaded (500 MB) and installed it, and that was the end of my experience with OOTB. No instructions on what to do next. I perused around the filesystem it installed and tried to run ant in a few directories, but no luck. So OOTB just gives me a bunch of OSS projects on my hard-drive, but they aren't built. I don't want to know what I'm doing wrong - I want to know where the documentation is that tells me what to do. I'd dig it if it let me install them projects (i.e. Apache) where I wanted, and also allowed me to upgrade existing installations. If it could migrate my existing settings or customizations, that would be even better. That is what I want.

That being said, I don't think I have much use for OOTB. Why? Because it's not updated enough. I'm the type of upgrade-happy SOB that wants to download and use as soon as the release announcement goes out. I want to get the latest snapshot from CVS and see if it solves my problems. I want to patch my local copy and fix the bugs myself. I want to install some applications in $TOOLS_HOME, and some in $SDKS_HOME. Lastly, while it's nice that OOTB sets the environment variables for me ($JAVA_HOME and $ANT_HOME), I'd appreciate it if it didn't overwrite my existing ones. A simple prompt to see if I want to change them would be sufficient. Especially since I have a newer version of Ant (1.5.3-1 vs. 1.5.3) than OOTB. I don't mean to be too critical - I just want to voice my true feelings. ;-)

RE: Eclipse 3.0 M1 is out!

Here is a link to all the cool new features in this release! You can download from here. [A Cup of Joe]

The upgrade-happy developer in me can't help but click the download link. The New and Noteworthy page (near the bottom) notes many improvements to Eclipse on the Mac. I'd really love it if Eclipse was fast on OS X and Apple released OS X on Intel. I really dig the OS, just not the speed of the hardware.

The Pragmatic Programmer

I began reading The Pragmatic Programmer this morning. I bought the book after hearing that it was Erik Hatcher's favorite technical book. Since Erik's Java Development with Ant was my favorite technical book - I figured this was a good recommendation. I've read one chapter and I'm loving it. This book will inspire me to be a better programmer - I can already tell.

I don't do nearly enough reading - too much blogging and OS development. So I'm going to try to read more - as David and Andrew recommend - at least one book a month. Actually, I'm going to shoot for two books per month - one technical and one non-technical. I'd compare this book to Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which I think is a great book for motivating good financial health. I read that bad boy last week in 2 hours!