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Finally hsqldb 1.9 (alpha, though) is released. This release was announced for, I believe, nearly one year. It seemed to me already that hsqldb is a rather dead projects. I am glad they made the next round, because in a way I still like that system a lot. Sure, Apache Derby is most likely the superior system, and H2 looks very promising too (but is still, as I understand it, a "one man show"

The architecture and design of software applications should be technical neutral. The Application Architecture Guide from Microsoft guides developers through the design of applicataions based on the .NET platform. In my opinion, this architecture guide not only focus on the .NET platform and is a really good cookbook for Software Architects. As we present in our Best Practice Project, design

It is interesting for me to observe: relational databases have been attacked several times in the last decades, e.g. with object-oriented databases (gone) or XML databases (gone). Now recently a new trend in data-management seems to appear: databases or better data storage/management mechanisms that follow a much looser paradigm than relational databases often using a lightweigt (often REST or

More than a year ago, I wrote a blog entry discussing Apache iBatis (my favorite "O/R" Mapping framework) and wrote mostly about the not so well known sub-project Abator. Today I realised that there was some significant updates on the iBatis project recently, and also a new Abator version, renamed to iBator as released.iBator is a code-generation tool that makes kind of introspection into a

I found an interesting project: migrate4j which was introduced at Javalobby today. The idea behind this tool is to leverage the issues that come up when applications are developed using a relational database and the database schema changes between version. I.e., databases at customers or used by other developers have to be modified to the needs of the new version of the software. Probably you

On 13th and 14th of March Berlin saw the ICOODB 2008 i.e. the First International Conference on Object Databases (some pictures here).Despite several transportation strikes more then 150 registered users were able to listen to the 25 talks at TFH-Berlin. The conference started with the science day on Thursday the 13th. Some of the first speakers have been:Christof Wittig (CEO db4objects Inc.)

In present software projects you encounter buzz words, such as SOA, Registry, Repository and many others. Today I took some time to look at the differences between Registry and Repository. From understanding I always had some "question marks" about:Are there any differences between them?Sharing concepts?Is there a relationship between a Registry and a Repository?Why is it necessary for a SOA, or

As you might know already, I am not the biggest fan of O/R mapping tools, but I understand, that they can be of great help in many projects. However, a nice article discusses the dominant position of Hibernate, which is really a pity. Many developers these days apparently believe Hibernate is the only option out there. It is not. As this article points out there are other probably better

So easy was it some years ago, when we had a database server and some telnet clients or forms-application that interacted with the database. ACID was the way to go (consistency, transaction-wise). See for example Jim Grays paper from 1981. Now we go Internet, distributed. And it became clear, that this would change the reception of consistency. In a recent article in his blog "All things

The Data Access Object (DAO) pattern is an essential design pattern in enterprise applications. In a DAO all data access to the underlying data source is encapsulated by providing a generic interface. Service components use the DAO in order to load and save data to the data source.A DAO interface usually provides common CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. The implementation of such

Let me wish you a happy new year and welcome this year with a little announcement:On 13+14th March there will be an Object Database Conference in Berlin.Some facts, before I explain why this is important for Software-Engineering and not only for the Database / Persistence area.A) The conference is split into a Science Day (13th March / Thursday) and an Application Day (14th March / Friday). There

As already explained in the previous posting, we had the great opportunity to record interviews with the keynote speakers of VLDB 2007. In the second podcast episode we got three more interviews with Eric Brewer, Michael Stonebraker and Michael Brodie (from left to right):Eric Brewer talks about technologies that can help emerging countries in building up IT and communications infrastructure,

Today I had the pleasure to record the interview with Werner Vogels, the CTO from Amazon.com, who held the keynote speach of the Very Large Databases Conference currently held in Vienna.The interviewer is Dr. Ross King from Vienna University and the interview is part of our "Woche der Informatik" podcast. This podcast is actually in German, however for the English speaking audience the VLDB

Regarding to my previous post about JPA and DAO it is useful to look at the following article, illustrating a small example showing the basic usage of JPA. The example includes:Annotate your object model with Java Persistence Annotations, including relationships and inheritanceHow do work with lazy initialationsNamed QueriesHow to use the Entity ManagerThe example should clarify the discussion

I've found an interesting post discussing "JPA killed the DAO". The DAO (Data Access Object) pattern is one of the fundamental patterns used in building software systems. This object abstract and encapsulates all access to the data (database, file, xml...) and provides a common interface, used by the business layer.The new Java Persistence API defines an interface to persist normal Java objects

In the previous post, Alex gives an overview about Wicket and what advantages and disadvantages this component based framework has. The majority of web applications are very data intensive, where simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations needed. Apart from this, many software projects use the popular ORM (Object Relational Mapping) Tool Hibernate in association with annotated domain

In the current issue of Infoweek.ch I describe options to handle XML data with Java. "Traditionally" well known strategies are SAX (simple API for XML parsing) and DOM (document object model) parser. While parsers following these strategies are still used, and there are good reasons to do so, in the last years several new concepts appeared on the scene. Let's give a brief review of XML parsing

As I am currently writing on another article about O/R mapping and persistence strategies (hopefully to be published soon, stay tuned) I had a discussion today with Stefan Edlich who is expert in object-databases like db4o (check out his book on db4o!) as well as in Hibernate. We had some discussions at the "persistence-event" we organised in Vienna last year (I reported about it with a longer

Java Template EnginesIn the current Infoweek.ch magazine I discuss Java-based template engines. One of the earliest tools in this category was Webmacro. However, the problem at the time was, that Webmacro was published under Gnu Public License, which obviously makes it unusable for many (if not most) projects, even open source projects. So a team of developers started Apache Velocity. Meanwhile

As I am writing some articles about iBatis these days, I came across the iBatis "Subproject", or "Tool" Abator.I think it was obvious from my recent posts, that I have quite some sympathies for the iBatis project. However, writing the persistence part with iBatis (and also other persistence framworks) still means a lot of typing. Typically you have to create the following artifacts:Create