Unfortunately, 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 out — are equally keen to help with the areas that they have experience of.
Hibernate has no user mailing list, just a large forum site that’s easy to ignore. Mailing lists encourage people to respond because queries drop in their inboxes; forums tend to be visited in times of need, and people are probably less likely to drop by for philanthropic reasons.
As an example, I’ve posted three queries (plus one repost and various followups) in the Hibernate forums over the course of a month, politely and with plenty of information. Despite hundreds of views, and the fact that two of them highlight features which don’t work as described, not a single reply from anyone else has been forthcoming. Not even a one-liner saying “bad question, RTFM” or “working as designed” or “known bug”.
Maybe this is sour grapes, but the amount of community feedback from other OSS projects puts this to shame.
Andrew.
There are several other posts in this series. Please read the disclaimer before you write an angry reply.
{ 5 } Comments
Hibernate has a publicly available JIRA tracker at:
http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH
Apart from that, you really can’t expect Hibernate developers to act as your own personal support.
Granted, Hibernate has a steep learning curve. But, the problem with majority of questions on Hibernate forum is that they have been asked and answered many times before. People sometimes drop an one-liner, saying something like: “Filters in Hibernate do not work!” and sometimes they dump their entire project in one post and ask: “What am I doing wrong?”. Part of the problem is that the domain which Hibernate targets is simply not that easy to understand. ORM is hard and complex, and Hibernate has gotten around to being quite big. Much bigger then Guice or CXF.
As you’ve noticed, neither Guice nor CFX have user bases that are as big as Hibernate, so it’s not a reasonable base of comparison.
Your argument about mailing lists being better than forums only makes sense if there were no such thing as email filters. Trust me, most open source developers are ignoring mail from *many* mailing lists. So, sorry, no easy fix there.
stanasic:
“Apart from that, you really can’t expect Hibernate developers to act as your own personal support.”
No, I don’t, but it is quite telling that I had to put all these points in a blog in order to get any sort of feedback whatsoever.
And it’s not like I’m a PLZ TO SHOW ME THE CODEZ leech, I’m giving up my Saturday here to try to make Hibernate easier to use and less intimidating for new users… :-)
PS — I’m not sure a policy of ‘if you think you have found a bug, post a JIRA’ is in anyone’s best interests. Surely that’ll just clog the system with tickets that aren’t really bugs at all?
I would want to dissuade people from posting JIRAs until some unexpected behaviour has been positively identified as a novel bug, rather than a misunderstanding, user error or simply a known issue. But then this isn’t my project so I don’t set the policy.
Andrew, I see all your points. I personally don’t follow Hibernate forums, precisely because of the clogging, as I already explained in #4, I think.
But, then, there is no easy solution for bug tracking in any open-source project, and especially something with so may features as Hibernate. The only possible thing, in my opinion, is that if you encounter a possible bug, you try to recreate it with minimal configuration (e.g. 1-2 mapped entity) and in a form of test, so that the person that reads it can easily dump it in their workspace and see what it’s about.
I hope you don’t take any of my comments the wrong way, since I’m only trying to highlight that using an ORM solution is rather difficult in itself, as well as using an open-source library of that size.
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