MikeWitters.com
My $0.02 on stuff.
java
Hibernating with WebSphere and a non-journaling DB2/400 system
Dec 4th
A few years ago, I worked as a consultant at a company that used DB2/400 as its main database platform. The company did not have journaling ‘turned on’ so their database platform did not support transactions/commit control. This did seem odd to me, but what I’ve found is that its pretty common that DB2/400 shops don’t use this feature. While this seemed like a mere oddity and an inconvenience for commit control, it actually caused a more measurable issue which was that we couldn’t use Hibernate, one of, if not the most common ORM framework. Hibernate requires transactions. This is a problem for anyone wanting to use a non-journaled DB2/400 instance… in particular me. Read the rest of this entry »
Open source application servers. A tough decision ahead for us.
Oct 21st
One of the cool things about the new job I will _officially_ be starting in November is that we are going to look to use open source tools first. The biggest choice we have to make on that front is which open source application server to use. We have the go ahead to get an environment setup and in-use for some pilot applications that are less mission-critical than most of the apps we have on our primary WebSphere servers. Now comes the time we need to decide which open source application server(s) we will use. Read the rest of this entry »
I got a new job!
Oct 12th
I have accepted a position at a company in Dayton. The position is with a company that I have been working for as a consultant off and on (mostly on) for the last three years. I will be a ‘Technical Architect’ in the ‘Enterprise Solutions’ group at WinWholesale. I am very excited about this new opportunity. In my new position I will be the technical leader of the group that is dealing with newer technologies. We will be making use of open source technologies where they make sense and employing an agile software development methodology. One of the most important things to me is Read the rest of this entry »
What if what you’re modeling really is anemic?
Jun 27th
I firmly agree with Domain-Driven Design, but a few weeks ago I looked back at my last several projects and thought that I may not have been adhering to it. Martin Fowler wrote about an anti-pattern called AnemicDomainModel on this page quite a while back. Looking at the last few applications I have written for this client, I basically see a whole lot of bean-like objects, that is objects with a lot of state (getters/setters) but no behavior – a big indicator of the AnemicDomainModel. How could I have fallen into this trap? I struggled for quite a while trying to decide where I screwed up and what precipitated this issue. Have I worked at a high level for too long and forgotten how to take care of the details? Have I been doing too many WebSphere installations and integration setups to do the software development? After thinking about it for a while I finally settled on the opinion that what I’ve been modeling for the last few projects really is anemic, at least from the software design/class modeling perspective, so I can dig my head out of the sand. Read the rest of this entry »
A journey ‘Back to Smalltalk’
May 16th
I read a blog post about a developers journey from Smalltalk to PHP to Ruby and back with probably a bunch of other stuff mixed in between. In this post, the author puts into words many of the things I have wondered about for the last several months. I am by no means a Ruby or Ruby-on-Rails expert, but I have messed with it enough. I do like it. Its nice and clean, simple to use, and easy to get up and running quickly.
I remember my transition from Smalltalk to Java. When I had somewhat mastered Smalltalk Java started to become the big thing. For some reason I felt the need to move to Java. Read the rest of this entry »
