Better Faster Lighter Java [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

7.1 The Lie

As a kid, you probably heard the story of the three little pigs. In
this story, there's a pig that "did
it right the first time" by building a house out of
brick. I'd like to suggest a more likely
alternative. Once upon a time, there were three pigs that wanted to
build houses. Two were reasonable and pragmatic. The third was an
anal-retentive jerk. The first two pigs checked out the lay of the
land and available resources. They built simple but functional houses
with readily available, simple building materials. At the same time,
the third pig decided to build a hardened mansion out of the
world's hardest brick. He began to plan. The first
two pigs completed their houses and happily moved in before their
brother was half done with his new place.

The third pig was in over his head. He eventually ran out of money
before he could finish and abandoned the project, leaving town in
disgrace. When a wolf threatened, the two pragmatic pigs simply
hardened their houses with adobe. The wolf left in frustration and
eventually ate the third pig, putting him out of his misery. Of
course, that's not what the full-color glossy
brochures say.

Customer reference stories about overbuilt commercial technologies
abound. Good companies meticulously plan those early successes. Be
careful, though. If you're not one of the lucky few
first customers, you'll likely do your homework and
ask for references. It's hard to get the truth,
especially in the earliest stages. Though the successes may be real,
you will likely not have the massive support structures that the
vendors put into such engagements to ensure successful reference
stories. That's how we as an industry adopted EJB
far before it was ready. In fact, EJB is only the latest in a line of
a massive technologies that were adopted and lauded far before they
provided mainstream value. At IBM, I lived through three in rapid
succession in Open Doc, SOM, and CORBA. Big, reputable customers
bought those solutions, and not because they were dumb.
It's just harder to discern the truth when
there's so much noise out there.

In this chapter, I'll show you an alternative to the
mega-framework. First, you'll see a smaller, lighter
persistence framework called Hibernate. It's a
transparent persistence framework that you can use to keep to many of
the principles in this book. Later, I'll go a step
further and grade the Hibernate team on their observance of our five
basic principles.

I'm going to assume that as a Java programmer,
you've run across database problems often enough to
know a little about relational databases such as the SQL query
language. I don't assume that you know much more
about persistence frameworks.