Blogging Roller

(via Lance) This quote from Free Software Foundation lawyer Eben Moglen seems to clarify the issue of using an LGPL jar in a non-GPL application (such as Roller). As long as the jar is LGPL, rather than GPL, you can include it in your application and then license your application however you choose. Here is the key quote:

Eben Moglen: If the author of the other code had chosen to release his JAR under the Lesser GPL, your contribution to the combined work could be released under any license of your choosing, but by releasing under GPL he or she chose to invoke the principle of "share and share alike."

Some conversations at the last RTP bloggers lunch left some doubt in my mind about LGPL, but the above quote clears it up nicely.

Roller uses the Castor persistence framework. FreeRoller can be very slow.

Are the two things related? I have no real empirical evidence (yet) to prove a link, but I did find an interesting link of a different sort in my referer logs this morning to a blog entry by (Roller user) Matthew Porter. Back in December 2002, Matthew chose Hibernate instead of Castor for the Java Lobby Community Port (JLCP) project. Here's why:

Persistent Framework Choice for JLCP: Castor was not chosen for two primary reasons. The first is the lack of development of Castor in the past year. In addition, one the tests we performed at DMI, Castor was significantly slower than other PFs- to the point where it was intolerable. The first reason and recent tests led me to believe that the situation regarding speed had not changed.

Also, an interesting link was posted in a comment on my Long Transactions post yesterday. This is a pretty interesting article:

O/R Mapping with Castor JDO in the Real World: Castor holds up to its promises in simple testing and trial runs. However, it has proven to fall short in some practical issues with our application of about twenty-five data classes and as many tables. Most of our problems come from the need to hold onto objects across transactions and perform complex updates.

I'm tempted to rewrite the Roller backend using Hibernate just for the hell of it, but I really should to do some profiling of Roller to see where the problem lies, don't you think? I guess I could do a 30-day eval of OptimizeIT or JProbe, but I would be happy to hear your recommendations for free and/or open source profiling tools. Got any?