Original Whatever

I'm always having an argument with myself about how much intelligence to put in the database. I have a strong preference: none. I would rather work in Java and just let the database store data. But I always make an exception for database-generated identifiers, and then I start thinking that maybe I should write a trigger to let the database take care of timestamps, or recalculate a photo's total rating in photoSIG when someone ads a new critique, or... And then I start thinking that maybe I should do the opposite, remove the database-generated IDs, use UUIDs for everything, and really use the database just for storing data. For lots of domain objects I maintain two fields, "created" and "updated." You can probably figure out what they do. Throughout the photoSIG code I am forever updating the updated field. I decided to investigate whether I can use Hibernate to do this for me. I only really care about when the object was written to the database, n...

Philip Greenspun is another prolific developer and author. He created the immensely popular photo.net web site and developed database-backed web sites back when that was cutting-edge, even writing a book about it, called Database-Backed Web Sites . I don't know if Philip came up with the subtitle himself, which is "The Thinking Person's Guide to Web Publishing," but it sounds like something that he would say. It's interesting that back then, someone was willing to publish a book just about interfacing web sites with databases. These days, of course you're going to integrate your web site with a database. The days of static web sites are pretty much over. Using code that he developed in the early days of the Internet, Philip founded ArsDigita Corporation and produced the open-source ArsDigita Community System, beating pretty much everyone in the race to develop a reusable, extensible web framework. Interestingly, ArsDigita also suffered through a somet...

I'm a software developer. I've been developing web applications of varying degrees of complexity for about six years or so, mostly in Java. I investigate a lot of new technology in the Java space, and I've been noticing for a while now that whenever I google for information about some bit of technology, I always find something on Matt Raible's blog . I've never met the guy and, as far as I know, don't use any of his code, but I feel like I know him pretty well at this point. Which got me thinking: maybe there's something to this blog thing. So here is mine. I've been writing software for pretty much as long as I can remember. I can remember a time when I wasn't very good at it, which always seems to have ended about five years ago. But I can only barely remember a time at which I wasn't involved with computers in some fashion. My folks bought a computer, an Atari 800, when I was about 11, but even before that, I had taken some programming ...