This week I’m back in Westborough, MA, teaching EJB’s in RAD6. EJB’s have a rather nasty learning curve. Here that’s made worse by the fact that the students only have the previous two training classes as experience.
(This is the same group I taught Intro Java in May and Servlets and JSP’s in June. The companion group in Philadelphia I’ll see again next week.)
Now that I’ve been spending all this time with Hibernate, entity beans look downright primitive. I understand that EJB 3.0 completely revises them and makes them very Hibernate-like, but I haven’t had a chance to really dig into that. Not to mention that most companies I deal with use WebSphere as their app server, which doesn’t even understand J2SE 5, much less Java EE 5. Some day that will change, I guess. In the meantime I’ll use JBoss for experimentation.
Last week I downloaded Eclipse 3.2 and ran the update wizard to install all the Callisto plug-ins. The product took forever to start up. Then, when I tried to make a simple Hello World servlet, the whole thing crashed for reasons unknown. I’d hate to think they’ve turned Eclipse into RAD, with all the attendant issues, but we’ll see about that, too.
Speaking of Hibernate, I wish I’d realized earlier how valuable the Hibernate in Action book is. Since it dealt with Hibernate 2 and the field has moved to at least Hibernate 3, I was afraid the material would be too dated to be useful. That, as they say, turned out not to be the case. Many of the answers I need are in there.
Once again, I wish I had the Matrix capability of absorbing an entire book in seconds. It would be worth the metal plug in the back of my head. It would even be worth it that it would pretty much put me out of business. I have about a dozen books I need to grok sooner rather than later, and that would make it all so easy. 🙂
Even though the second edition (now called Java Persistence with Hibernate) is on the way, it won’t be available until November. I wish it was part of Manning’s early access program, because I could really use it now. Instead, I just bought the HiA ebook, since I already have the hard copy. Now I can carry it along wherever I go.
I feel like I’m getting much closer to really understanding Hibernate. I still have a long way to go, though.
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