Guus Bosman

Yesterday I went out with a group of colleague's. The weather was great so we started in the late afternoon at the outside café 'Paris'. It's a long-standing tradition of Chess to celebrate the weekend there every Friday.

At the Grote Markt was the annual "Haarlem Culinair" festival; but as we were with a large group and it was very busy it was unpractical to find a place for dinner there. Instead we went to Jills, where we had a fun dinner. The food was good; I enjoyed the chicken salad very much.

We went for drinks and dancing in Van Stoffelen; that was great fun, as always. They played "Dragostea Din Tei"; one of my favourite songs at the moment.

The project I'm working on is going well. We're creating a web-based management application for an existing product, and yesterday I tested the integration with the real application. Everything works smoothly.

Choosing Hibernate was definitely a right choose -- it increases the productivity a lot.

It's a quiet period -- many friends and colleague's are on holiday, as are my parents. Next week Sasha will be coming back! That will be a very busy time for both of us; there's a lot to do.

I was planning to go and pick up Jerry tonight together with Marjolein, his girlfriend, and other friends and family. He's traveling back from Ecuador today, after a staying there to do research.

However, Marjolein just e-mailed and said that he won't arrive tonight. His plane landed in Caracas, Venezuela where he'll be staying a while because there was something wrong with the plane. He will probably arrive here sometime tomorrow.

Two weeks ago I was starting up a new project, and I wasn't sure if I should introduce the Spring framework. I decided not to. First, the immediate benefits are not clear enough, unlike Hibernate for example, but most of all I didn't want to introduce too many new technologies at once to the development team.

We are using Struts as MVC framework, which is more and more becoming a company standard for web applications, but not everybody on the team has worked with it before. Another new tool for some of the team members is Hibernate. The (existing) database uses stored procedures. It turns out that there are only a few of those and that they're used only for a few specific data insert statements -- not to manage all possible data manipulations. This means there was no data manipulation layer yet and so using Hibernate for the management tool is not a problem.

A last nice feature we're using is a ServletFilter that validates the HTML that we're generating. Not really rocket-science, but a strong and certain way to make sure that the HTML we're creating is standard compliant and valid.

Combined Hibernate and Struts make for a nice and very productive application framework. One of the things I would like to do next time is to look into something to deal with the boiler-plate code that's sometimes necessary for Hibernate. A colleague is looking into Hibernate Synchronizer, but my initial feeling is that a more well known tool such as XDoclet might be a better investment. It's a bit too risky for my taste to build an application on a tool created by single person. His website has been down for a couple of days too -- not a good sign, either.