nothing like a good ol' flame war to cure the blues

Great article by Martin Fowler:
http://java.dzone.com/articles/martin-fowler-orm-hate

Crisp, cool and informative as usual. 


But then things started to warm up a little in the comments section:

Frederic Bellier replied on Wed, 2012/05/09 - 9:17pm 

Woah!!! The world has come to an end.
Martin Fowler who I usualy consider as an influencial professional is now writting misinformed articles.
Where to start? There are just too many untruth and mis-information in this article - I cannot go over them all.
But for everyone interested in this topic. ORM does not work and will never work. I have 20 years experience in this field and have build some of the largest systems around where performance is paramount. I can tell you ORM cannot possibly work becuase it automatically means the access to the data will be much slower. This is not due to the incompetence of the dev involved but because of the ill conceived architecture of ORM. I have had the top engineers who build the ORM tools from the vendors telling me this.
The idea to conect an object graph in memory and a relational data structure is simply flawed. The network inefficiencies resulting from that approach are astronomical.
Moreover, ORM is based on a false premise - that SQL is hard. In fact SQL is simple. And for everyone out there interested in computer science. LEARN SQL. It is simple fast and cannot be replaced by anything else since it is a SET language to work on Set data. Replacing on standard Set language by a multitude of proprietary languages (one for each vendors) is of course silly.
And by the way - iBatis is not an ORM tool. It is actually a very good tool - this one works. It simply allows you to populate your objects from a result set.
Putting iBatis in the same categories as Hibernate only shows MF ignorance in this topic. I guess it is time to retire.
FB

Some pretty decent and well-informed arguments, but it does smell slightly trollish. Hmmm, maybe I should put some popcorn in the microwave.


And yes, I was right! The fanboys are IRKED!!! :D

Jammer Man replied on Thu, 2012/05/10 - 11:53am  in response to:FredericBell 

In your 20 years of experience you obviously haven't learned very much at all. I'd pick MF's opinion over some garden-variety d0uche troll like yourself any day.

ROFLMAO!!! Haven't laughed this hard in a long time!!! Thank you God for tech flame wars! :D

groovy: logback configuration

Logback configuration is much easier in groovy than in xml:

import ch.qos.logback.classic.encoder.PatternLayoutEncoder
import ch.qos.logback.core.FileAppender
import ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender
import static ch.qos.logback.classic.Level.DEBUG
import ch.qos.logback.core.status.OnConsoleStatusListener


/*
 * see http://mrhaki.blogspot.in/2010/09/grassroots-groovy-configure-logback.html
 * and http://logback.qos.ch/manual/groovy.html 
 * for logback.groovy examples
 */

appender("FILE", FileAppender) 
{
    def ts = timestamp("yyyy-MM-dd'_'HH-mm-ss")
    
    file = "./logs/trybeTest.${ts}.log"
    append = true
    encoder(PatternLayoutEncoder) 
    {
        pattern = "%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} [%thread] %-5level %logger{36} - %msg%n"
    }
}


appender("CONSOLE", ConsoleAppender) 
{
    //append=true
    encoder(PatternLayoutEncoder) 
    {
      pattern = "%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} [%thread] %-5level %logger{36} - %msg%n"
    }
}

//logger "scratchpad", DEBUG, ["CONSOLE"]
root DEBUG, ["FILE", "CONSOLE"]

upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 "not recommended" until july

Was hoping to upgrade my Lucid Lynx laptop to Precise Pangolin today.

Though I was an unflinching Windows user before, I simply fell in love with Ubuntu (and a few other distros like Linux Mint - which happens to be derived from Ubuntu) and started using it in dual boot mode. Eventually, I became less and less dependent on the Windoze drug. Once the withdrawal symptoms (couldn't play my favorite PC games) passed, I realized I didn't need Win at all.

I got rid of my dual-boot and deployed Lucid Lynx and Mint Julia on my work and personal laptops, respectively and there's been no looking back. I only needed Win7 once in the last year, and that was when I had to do some WinPhone7 development+testing at work. (And perhaps a few times more when I gave in to my gaming craving :P)

Lucid has been an awesome, fast, dependable companion, but I heard really good stuff about PP since its recent release and I eagerly wanted to give it a test drive.

However, just when I was about to plug in an external drive for a pre-upgrade backup, I read this on the official upgrade docs:

Upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

It is generally recommended that users of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS wait until the first point release, due in July, before upgrading.

Furthermore, seems that there was a major bug in upgrading from LL to PP from CD where one of the Ubuntu developers has this to say:

It's OK for you to try it, but we aren't going to encourage it because
in our experience the extra testing from early-adopter upgraders before
.1 is important in making sure that upgrades are really solid for
everyone by the time we turn it on by default.

Oh well. A couple more months to go before I get PP goodness on my lappy. But I will try a PP live boot from pen drive some time soon.

bash: simple script to send alerts if service is down

Here's a simple shell script I cooked up to alert me if my REST service went down for any reason. This was never meant for a production system (where we have nagios and other robust alerting mechanisms) but for an integration/sandbox environment. An external team (subcontractor) was integrating with our REST service deployed on this sandbox and we couldn't afford to have downtime, or the team's productivity would suffer.

It worked like a charm, took just 30 mins to write, test and deploy. Since the external REST service was deployed on a public IP [otherwise how could the external team reach it - we couldn't allow them to VPN in], this script could potentially run from any machine anywhere.

Saving this script here since it was so simple and useful.

#!/bin/bash
#
# sandbox_sanity_check.sh: a simple utility to alert relevant folks if our integration (i.e. sandbox-ext) Trybe Service goes down
# sandbox-ext is in the /etc/hosts file
targetbox=sandbox-ext
# who should we send alert mails to?
recipients="ambar@xyz.com, rakesh@xyz.com, sandeep@xyz.com"
while [ 1 ] 
do
    logfile=sandbox.`date '+%A'`.log

    curl --silent "http://${targetbox}/trybe/v1/config/TEST_067e6162-3b6f.2L_20k_60k?uid=%7B%22aid%22:%22889835751ebf3e49%22%7D&api_key=shared_key&api_nonce=8nk9pbnhacfvgc&api_ts=1333042920376&channel_id=1&api_sig=aba00fdd0058e00111b286c6356f2a70" | grep "trialConfig"

    if [ $? -eq 0 ] 
    then
        echo "[INFO] [`date '+%d_%m_%Y_%H-%M-%S'`] getConfig succeeded " | tee -a ${logfile} ; echo;  
    else
        echo "[ERROR] [`date '+%d_%m_%Y_%H-%M-%S'`] getConfig FAILED... here is the curl output:" | tee -a ${logfile} ; echo; 
        curl -v "http://${targetbox}/trybe/v1/config/TEST_067e6162-3b6f.2L_20k_60k?uid=%7B%22aid%22:%22889835751ebf3e49%22%7D&api_key=shared_key&api_nonce=8nk9pbnhacfvgc&api_ts=1333042920376&channel_id=1&api_sig=aba00fdd0058e00111b286c6356f2a70" >> ${logfile} 2>&1
        echo | tee -a ${logfile};
# send alert email to $recipients using good ol' mutt
        mutt -s "[sandbox checker]: getConfig FAILED" ${recipients}  < /var/local/sandbox.mail.message 
    fi  

    sleep 30
done