Software is too expensive to build cheaply...

I was checking over my web stats recently, and I noticed a trend has emerged solidly over the last few months: most of the search terms that lead to my blog are about Hibernate. Of my top 20 search terms, 11 were about Hibernate, and I'm in the Google top-10 for most of those terms (somewhat surprisingly...). Now, I'm not talking hundreds of search hits, but I am talking more than dozens.

All up, and at this time, I've written ten articles on this site about Hibernate, in various depth. To make life easier for people who are looking here for Hibernate-related material, I've added a Hibernate sub-category (underneath the Java category), and put those articles in it.

Caveat: I am not a Hibernate guru. I don't even play one on TV. I'm merely a Hibernate user who has taken the time to write up things he has found out or thought about. No accuracy is assured, though I will happily accept corrections.

Hibernate has extensive support for caching built in (well, provided by various plugins, actually). This caching means that potentially expensive database operations can be avoided, especially in smaller apps (ie, non-clustered, which actually can go to quite a large size).

Most people who use Hibernate caching are used to having object instances cached. Hibernate can also cache query results. However, there are some things you need to be aware of when you do this.

When working simply with Hibernate, you end up coding to concrete classes. This violates the idea that you should program to a type, not an implementation. It also means that various things you tend to do with Hibernate (like writing getters and setters) end up "polluting" your domain classes.

If you're reading the version of this entry on my site, you'll probably already have noticed the new GoogleAds. This is an experiment I'm trying out to see how effective they are at serving up meaningful ads.

This is not an attempt to "monetize" this blog. Heck, monetize isn't even a real word - it's just one of those fake "turn a noun into a verb" type businesey words. I don't expect to make even enough out of it recoup my hosting costs (which would only take one payment per year). Even if I wanted to, this blog doesn't get enough traffic to make any serious money, I expect.

What this actually is is an attempt to aid the reader who comes here from Google (or other search engines). Search engines referalls account for about 60% of my traffic, and nearly all of the traffic to older articles (that hasn't come from spam bots, anyway). By targetting ads there, I hope to provide items of interest to those readers.

So, if you see an ad that interests you, feel free to follow it. However, don't just follow ads because what I've written has interested you. :) Do it for your own sake, not mine.

One issue with generics is how much the generic declaration repeats, particularly with collections. Consider this:

Map<Date, List<Event>> eventBook = new HashMap<Date, List<Event>>

How ugly... that repeatition gets very wearying over time. Here's a few tips to deal with it.