Re: searching for yoda - a developer's tale

From: Rhino (rhino1_at_NOSPAM.sympatico.ca)
Date: 02/24/05 

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:44:14 -0500

<dexter@uwm.edu> wrote in message
news:1109192243.928653.308740@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Hello,
>
> if there are any wise and knowing individuals reading this who might be
> able to set me on the true path, i'd be indebted.
>
> So, the story goes: I've been a Java developer for a great long while,
> but in a *very* sheltered community - I don't know and haven't used a
> great many of what have become standard technologies. Most every
> significant project involves a number of headaches that I believe have
> been solved by said technologies.
>
So far, that's not terribly unique; the vast majority of us have not used at
least SOME of the popular tools and technologies. Some of us may have been
as sheltered as you or even more so. (I'm thinking of some of the newbies
who have just started Java: some of them may not have any significant
systems experience at all and may be using Java as their first programming
language.)

In other words, you're not THAT far off the beaten path, so don't get TOO
concerned ;-)

> I code with vi and build with hand-made scripts. I handle versioning
> with hand-made scripts. I use no GUI builder and write JDBC to handle
> persistence.
>
If that works for you, it shouldn't be a cause for immediate concern. Of
course, you may find that you would get some serious productivity gains by
looking at some of the newer tools and technologies.

> I'm made aware of (and reasonably sold on) eclipse
> (http://www.eclipse.org). This can be made to include a GUI builder
> (http://www.eclipse.org/vep/) and handle versioning through cvs
> (https://www.cvshome.org/). There's also a thing called MyEclipse
> (http://www.myeclipseide.com) which I know nothing about.
>
> I *hate* writing SQL in seperate DAO's and worrying about a handcoded
> persistence manager, connection caching, etc. This should be
> automated. I search for a while and find the community has largely
> come to like Hibernate (http://www.hibernate.org). There are even
> plug-ins for Eclipse: Hibernator (http://hibernator.sourceforge.net/),
> Hibernate Synchronizer (http://hibernatesynch.sourceforge.net/), and
> Hiberclipse (http://hiberclipse.sourceforge.net/) are all mentioned in
> an article
> (http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/01/05/hibernate.html).
>
> Hibernate Synchronizer seems to have the largest community, so I look
> into it further. Looks like the empahsis is on going from a mapping
> file to a db and Java code. There is a thing called middlegen
> (http://boss.bekk.no/boss/middlegen/) that lets you start from the db
> -- but what I'm good at is Java...
>
> Ah ha, one can make Java generate the mapping file if one uses XDoclet
> (http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net/xdoclet/index.html), and the XDoclet
> hibernate plug-in (http://xdoclet.codehaus.org/Hibernate+plugin)
> ...sort of -- many references hint at bugs. XDoclet uses lower layers
> to do its work which I'm not sure one needs to master independantly,
> but they include Generama, Velocity, and Freemaker...
>
> All of this of course requires Ant (http://ant.apache.org/), although
> the XDoclet example for Ant is missing -- no worries, it does include
> an example using Maven (http://maven.apache.org/). All of the set-up
> for darn near everything uses XML of course, and there's an xml editor
> plug-in for Eclipse -- XMLBuddy (http://www.xmlbuddy.com/)
>
> Most of the Hibernate examples use the HSQLDB
> (http://hsqldb.sourceforge.net/) for development.
>
> That's a boatload of technologies folks. I've got active projects for
> which I'd like to use Eclipse/Hibernate and don't have the time (I've
> wasted far too long already) to fully investigate and learn all this.
> What is the proper path through this open-source forest?
>
I wish I had a perfect answer for you but the fact is that no one can tell
you the best way to learn things without knowing you pretty well. I've done
quite a bit of teaching of computer courses in my career (in private
industry, not in the school systems) and I've found that there are several
different ways of learning; no particular method is best for everyone. Some
people can hear something described in a lecture and then apply it
immediately with the help of a reference manual. Some people can work
through a tutorial on their own and pick up what they need to know. Some
people can figure out everything they need from the reference manual alone.
And so on. No one could possibly tell you the best way for YOU to learn.

A lot of people have not even figured out how they best learn. They may
remember one "learning experience" favourably and another unfavourably but
they may never have analyzed why one approach worked really well and why
another failed miserably. If you haven't thought about it yourself, I would
strongly advise that you analyze which approaches have worked best for you.

Then, if your best approach happens to be classroom courses, look for
courses that cover the material you want to learn - and ask here if you have
trouble finding them. Maybe someone here can point you to a course that
would meet your needs. While courses can be expensive, they can also be a
very efficient way to learn something. [I remember an early employer handing
me a poorly-written IMS manual and inviting me to learn how to code
database calls from it. It took me a few months to get even a working
knowledge and roughly a year of trial-and-error coding to get fluent with
IMS; if they had spent the money to send me on a lousy three day course, I
would have been fluent in MUCH less time!]

If your best approach turns out to be tutorials, ask here if you need help
finding tutorials for the topics that interest you. And so on for all of the
different approaches.

Of course, you may have to settle for your second or third choice: if you
thrive on classroom courses but there isn't one for your topic, you may have
to settle for a tutorial or reference manual.

The other thing you should evaluate is why you want to learn these
technologies. If it is only for "bragging rights", I'm not sure if learning
these techniques is a good use of your time. If you want to be more
productive - do better work in less time - that seems like a much better
reason to me. In that case, you might ask people here what tools most helped
their productivity and then look at those as your first priorities.

For what it's worth, the only technologies you describe which I use
regularly are Eclipse and Ant. I also dabble in XML occasionally. I've never
used Hibernate or Maven or middlegen or XDoclet and, truthfully, don't even
know what they do. I'm vaguely curious about them but not enough to actually
investigate them ;-) My existing methods seem to work just fine for me so
"if it works, don't fix it".

Maybe you should drive your attempts to learn new tools by the problems you
are having. If SQL and JDBC are your biggest hassles right now - the ones
that eat the most of your valuable time - maybe you should start by trying
to replace them with 'friendlier' tools. Then, as you solve each problem
area, move on to another technology and add it to your bag of tricks.

My two cents worth,

Rhino

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