Blogging Roller

The French Application-Servers.com website is experimenting with using Roller-based <a href= "http://blogs.application-servers.com">weblogs to complement and possibly to replace message-board based forums, which often erupt into flame wars. Tres cool!

Thomas Mahler posted comment on my recent <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20021212#carlos_on_hibernate_vs_ojb">Carlos on Hibernate vs. OJB story and I'm promoting it to a post. I do not want to be unfair to OJB and I'm glad to hear that the issue of stolen code was a simple little mistake. Here is what Thomas had to say:

As one of the core OJB developers I'd like to correct some points.

- OJB is not focussing on JDO. OJB is focussing on transactional object persistence. We provide several "personalities" to give users their API of choice.
We currently support ODMG3.0, JDO1.0 and our own abstracted Object level transaction API (called OTM).

OJB has a layered architecture with a persistence kernel reponsible for all the O/R stuff. This kernel is shared by all three toplevel personalities.

We have *not* been working on JDO for months. We are concentrating on a stable 1.0 release. JDO is in the 2.0 scope! So statements like "OJB is losing its way by focussing on JDO" do not make any sense.

- OJB did not steal any code! We have a little JDO prototype that has not been maintained for months. By accident one of our developers checked in some interface definitions from the JDORI codebase. These interfaces were not even referenced by our actual code! We settled this issue within hours by simply deleting the stuff from our CVS.

I don't see why such a minor incident should prevent us from building a OSS JDO implementation?

While on this topic, I should also thank Carlos for explaining why he does not like JDO and for pointing out that there is another open source JDO implementation called TJDO. I should have remembered that because I mentioned TJDO in my <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20021013">comparison of persistence frameworks back in October.

Excellent essay by Tim O'Reilly!

For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues. [Tim O'Reilly, Piracy is Progressive Taxation]

Andy Oliver have hundreds of visitors every day to his blog, probably because he writes about interesting things. He would possibly have even more readers if he didn't crap on his readership by not spending the extra few minutes to present his ideas better.

Mr. Incoherence says that Andy Oliver's writing is <a href= "http://www.freeroller.net/page/matsh/20021212#show_respect_for_your_readership">not coherent (scroll down to the bottom of the post), what a crock. Read <a href= "http://freeroller.net/page/acoliver/20021212#my_first_blog_flamewar_or">Andy's response. Here are my two cents. Andy writes in a no-holds-barred blast of the fire-hose style that is great fun to read even if you don't agree with him. If he went back to edit and soften his words, he would lose readers not gain them. There is a place for more formal, pedantic, and boring writing but not at Andy's blog. Perhaps Mr. Incoherence can establish a home for such writing at his place ;-)