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20021124 Sunday November 24, 2002

Writing a Technical Book Graham Glass offers some great suggestions on how he writes a book (tip of the hat to Matt Croydon). This is extremely valuable information for me, as I will be writing a couple chapters over the next few weeks. If I can follow in his footsteps, I'll be set!

A typical chapter takes me 3 or 4 days to write, including the source code for the examples, which I think is pretty fast. In addition, the high level book structure takes about a day.

The thing I'm struggling with right now is what persistence layer to use on my example Struts application. I'd like to use either Hibernate or Castor, but since I've never implemented either from scratch, I don't want to spend more time learning than implementing. And I'd like to generate the entire persistence layer - which seems possible with both. I'd like to use Middlegen, but then I'll have to use JDO or EJB's for my persistence layer. While JDO might be appropriate, EJBs are probably over-kill for an example app. The nice thing about Middlegen is that it will generate the JSP and Struts classes for me too. Posted in General at Nov 24 2002, 05:04:23 AM MST 2 Comments

Comments:

Why not use Xdoclet and Castor as we do now on Roller? You might want to find a slightly different mechanism than Dave's ValueObject for doing the actual persistance work, but then again it works (quite flexible if a bit opaque). Then you won't really have to learn a thing more about Castor. And while I'm no expert, I owe you a favor or two so I'd be willing to help you out with Castor (I know nothing about Hibernate, and I'd be willing to help debt-or-no-debt).

Posted by Lance on November 24, 2002 at 06:10 AM MST #

This is probably the easiest way - use something that already exists. However, I would love to create the entire persistence layer without writing any code (maybe a few XML files). I know this is something I've wanted to do on projects before - and I'm sure there are many other developers with this same desire. Middlegen generates code from a datamodel - and I'm pretty sure Turbine does this as well. I looked at Turbine once and couldn't figure it out though.

Posted by Matt on November 24, 2002 at 07:11 AM MST #

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