Michael Barton at Bioinformatics Zen recently posted an interesting article entitled “why write good software“. He makes an important point, but I think he underplays the importance of testing somewhat. I used to code (as a lot of bioinformatics people do) like this: write a huge pile of code, run it, see if it works. [...]
Tagged bioinformatics, testingMichael Nielsen has posted a longish article entitled “Three myths about scientific peer review”. It’s thought-provoking reading and will strike a chord with most researchers. He uses various examples from 20th-century science and before to question our assumptions about how the system works (and how well). There’s apparently a follow-up about the future of peer [...]
Tagged peer_review, publishingUpdate (1-Nov-09): Since writing this post nearly a year ago, I’ve come to realise that I was labouring under quite a few misconceptions myself, about REST. Spotting them all is left as an exercise for the reader. But I’d rather leave it here with this caveat, than remove it and pretend I knew better all [...]
Tagged rest, soap, webservicesHibernate is supposed to allow you to write queries and manipulate data in the normal Java idiom. Which is true up to a point, and that point is almost five years in the past, when Java introduced generics. Generics are absolutely standard practice in Java these days, and have been for two (nearly three) versions. [...]
Tagged hibernate, javaUnfortunately, open-source projects above a certain size seem to become victims of their own success. Many other excellent OSS products like Guice or CXF have user-centred mailing lists that the developers also read. These developers are generally very willing to help out with problems, and the users — having been treated kindly when they started [...]
Tagged hibernate, javaOn the Hibernate website (and elsewhere), one of the touted advantages of Hibernate over roll-your-own SQL is: Hibernate Core for Java generates SQL for you, relieves you from manual JDBC result set handling and object conversion, and keeps your application portable to all SQL databases. Well, not exactly. Many functions in HQL (Hibernate Query Language) [...]
Tagged hibernate, javaThe first in a series of missives on the subject of Hibernate. Disclaimer: I’m not out to bash Hibernate, nor do I fundamentally dislike it. In fact I think it’s an impressive piece of work, which is why I’m bothering to highlight some of its pitfalls, in the hope that this saves other people the [...]
Tagged hibernate, java
Latest Links of Interest