Jakub Korab

After much pain and suffering trying to get ternary relationships working correctly using the JPA annotations, I finally hit upon this post. The secret sauce: it makes use of the (rather poorly documented) @CollectionOfElements Hibernate annotation to annotate the set of link objects in the primary class, and makes the link class @Embeddable. No primary key class in the link.

JPA 2.0 supposedly manages to make this cryptic nonsense, including the ability to associate additional information with a link table, much easier.

It’s that time of the year again. We are just starting to ramp up getting this year’s conference in Dublin together for November. A good few months this time, as opposed to our insane 3 month schedule last year. There are a bunch of themes that we are looking to cover in this year’s line-up, but the crux of it will be around addressing common problems and how the tools can help to support that effort, rather than being a bog-standard tech showcase. It’s kind of a reverse point of view from what other other events take.

It was a great buzz putting it all together last year, and I know this one’s going to be even more fun, both for the delegates and speakers. We already have our scheming hats on

So, why no blog posts lately? Most of the interesting stuff that folks blog about are those issues and ideas which have currency, those at the forefront at their minds. Tech blogs too deal with the everyday. Issues that we have come across, interesting ideas, problems and techniques. However, in this day of corporate non-disclosure agreements and overly keen security departments sometimes it’s just not prudent to scratch that blogging itch, regardless of how tangential the topic might be.

On the flipside, if you didn’t know, Eclipse 3.4 aka Ganymede is out! With a whole bunch of new goodies as standard. After my first cursory test drive, the concensus is… very nice.

An unfortunately pessimistic, yet topical, post this time. You only have to walk past the news stands any given day to see the topic of the month. Knife crime is increasing, with the victims typically being teenagers. What were a couple of isolated incidents now appear to be accelerating into a sustained trend. Anyone who has read Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point would not be surprised to see the similarities between the case studies described, and what’s going on. Ironically, bringing media attention to the issue, and staging marches in unity against knife crime only serves to validate this behaviour as an appropriate way to resolve disputes. Seeing one’s peers behaving in a particular way serves to validate that behaviour as an acceptable form of expression. The current trend will only be stopped by applying lessons from past equivalents. In the meantime, we can unfortunately expect it to accelerate.