Get Lifted

Yeah, I'm a John Legend fan, but that's not the reference here. The reference is to Lift, the web application for Scala. Today IBM published an article I wrote about Lift. This was an article that I pitched to IBM and I was very excited about writing. Lift itself takes a different approach to web development than the typical MVC approaches. It is also in Scala, and takes great advantage of that languages features, especially its native support for XML.

One of the most surprising features of Lift was the ORM that it includes. Lift's creator, David Pollak, commented that he would use JPA for complex schemas and not Lift's ORM. I must admit, it was the part of Lift that took me the longest to get my head around. I consider myself quite the veteran of ORMs, but Lift's is definitely unique. I think it needs some tooling around it, as it felt like some boilerplate-ish code was present (like creating a model class and singleton factory for the model class.) However, I really liked its use of generics.

I didn't have time in the article to get into Comet with Lift and Scala's Actors. That is an awesome feature. Hmm, perhaps that should be another IBM article..

Finally, of Lift and Scala related news... check out Graceless Failure by some of the developer at Twitter. It seems to imply that Scala and maybe Lift or at least "in the mix" at Twitter. I wonder if it is replacing Ruby and/or Rails in some places. Certainly Actors would seem like an obvious way to handle new updates on Twitter.

SVJUG: JPA 2.0

Last night I went to the monthly SVJUG meeting. Patrick Linskey from BEA, err Oracle, spoke about JPA 2.0. First off, Patrick is an excellent speaker. I belive he was acuired by BEA via the SolarMetric acquisition, and now he's been acquired by Oracle. If nothing else, he is a much better speaker than anyone I've ever heard from Oracle. There were two very interesting things I saw in JPA 2.0.

The most interesting was query introspection. To me this move really makes it possible for JPA to get "pushed down the stack" if you will. I think it will allow for more abstracted frameworks to use JPA and hide it from the programmer. Working recently with Grails made me realize why this is important. Grails adds many JPA EntityManager methods to the domain classes. In many cases, you don't even have to call these methods. A typical Grails crud action does something like def myDomainObject = MyDomainObject.get(params.id) and then myDomainObject.properties = params and that's it. There is no explicit call to save() or persist(), etc. One could argue that this is a very good thing, as code like entityManager.persist(myDomainObject) is clearly boilerplate.

Now it would be pretty hard to get the similar functionality in Java, as you cannot add methods to objects at compile-time. You could make your domain objects extend an abstract class, but we are all too in love with POJOs to allow for that. However, a container of some sort could do these things for you. Introspection APIs into the JPA are a key to such a thing working. I don't know if the ones being added in JPA 2.0 are sufficient, or if that is even what the JPA folks have in mind, it's just an interesting possibility I see.

The other interesting addition to JPA 2.0 is adding a Cache interface to the spec. This is a nod to the implementers (like BEA's Kodo) that all use some type of "second level" cache. The API simply allows you to evict things from the cache, which seems reasonable enough. Cache invalidation is one of the hardest things out there, so it is nice to have explicit APIs for doing this. 

JPA is a topic close to my heart. I started working with Hibernate about six years ago. In some ways there are two philosophies out there when it comes to web-scale systems. One school of thought rejects relational databases. Take a look at Google's Big Table, Amazon's SimpleDB, or Ning's Content Store for examples of this. The other school embraces the relational database and says that they can be scaled. If you saw the eBay presentation at JavaOne, then you know what school eBay belongs to. I think that other RDBMS believers include Yahoo and Facebook. Historically ORMs get in the way of that scaling, and JPA is no exception. I'm not quite ready to give up on them yet.