Linh Chau

Hi Lijin,
I just knew about your web site yesterday, when I looked for Hibernate mapping type on the Internet using Google.

This is a very nice site, very informative.

However, I wonder if you have some free time to look outside of the J2EE world ?

J2EE world is becoming bloated with too much complication and frameworks which J2EE developers bring unto themselves.

(Having said that, I have worked with J2EE technologies for different companies in the U.S. for nearly 7 years – before that I had worked in Germany and Vietnam).

Recently, I decide to abandon Java, and move to Ruby and Ruby On Rails.

I will not write the whole article about Ruby and Ruby On Rails here. But I would like to urge you to give it a try.

To end the note, here is why I looked for Hibernate mapping type, and came to your site.

A company in the U.S. ask me to do some database design, create some database tables, and write some Hibernate XML files for them, for a hierarchy of different object types, which have inter-dependent relationship one-to-many, many-to-many …

For a long time, I haven’t worked with Hibernate, so after finishing the database design, I had to look for mapping types to put in the XML file, for example, SQL “SMALLINT” maps to Hibernate “byte” and map to Java “byte” …

They gave me about 3 hours to do that, and I fnished a little earlier. So I decided to build a test Web-based application using Rails, to prove that my database design work.

In what was left of 3 hours, I built the whole Web-based application using Ruby On Rails, with some Ajax features, covering all the important use cases of the database design.

Had I used Java, Spring, Hibernate, it would have taken me at least 10 more hours, if I were proficient in J2EE as I had been last year.

So, if you are curious, and want to explore new territory, Ruby and Ruby On Rails are very interesting things to see.