[Hibernate-devel] Hibernate

[Gavin_King/Cirrus%<CI...@ci...>]

Okay...

Thanks everyone for your offers of help. We should do this by mailing list,
I guess, so could everyone join the hibernate-devel mailing list here:

https://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=40712

and let me know your sourceforge usernames so I can give CVS access.

My priorities (which need not be yours, of course) for the next phase of
the project are:

New Features
============
1. XML Databinding
2. Extensions to Query Language
3. command line or GUI toolset for (a) generation and execution of table
schema (b) automated generation of skeletal XML mappings

Refactorings
============
1. The map package
2. The query package

The project has so far been executed very much along XP philosophy of
making things work first and then trying to make the code elegant. This has
worked quite well but right now the next new functionality will depend upon
first refactoring some existing design that has been pushed past its
limits.

The cirrus.hibernate.map package is a mess that is doing far more than it
was originally intended for and the schema generation tools and XML
databinding will depend upon it. I am in the process of refactoring it now
but I cant check anything into CVS quite yet.

The cirrus.hibernate.query package was written by some idiot (me) who had
no idea about parsers + lexers at the time. (On the other hand, it
successfully implements a pretty decent OO query language.) Anyways, I know
a whole lot more now and want to reimplement the query functionality using
an ANTLR grammar. I've got the ANTLR grammar sitting in CVS as
Hibernate/hql.g but if you compile that file with ANTLR it essentially
implements echo. A very high priority is to make it implement an
object-oriented-query-language-to-SQL translator! This should not be as
difficult as it sounds because as a first step we can reuse some old code,
particularly cirrus.hibernate.query.Query. If anyone wants to take on this
job that would be _brilliant_. The query language has the potential to be
one of the best features of the project and I can think of a few really
great extensions that would not even take that much work.

We need to have some discussions about the best approach to the databinding
stuff - but lets leave that for later.

The existing table-schema-generator is an un-object-oriented, ad hoc tool
that I described as "experimental" in the documentation - meaning it sucks.
You might have already noticed that for complicated schemas like in the
test suite it can't even drop its own tables on some databases! I'm
guessing that what users really need is a commandline or GUI tool. When
I've finished my refactorings to the map package (which will include a
proper OO model of relational database tables), that should be easier to
build. I think Daniel has already signed on for that.

The other tool I'd love to see is a GUI that lets the user map classes and
properties of classes (discovered by relection) to database tables and
columns _visually_ and spits out XML mappings. A first step towards this
would be a simple commandline tool that generates a skeleton mapping given
the name of a class.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
phew.

What ideas do _you_ guys have?

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There are two coding standards:
1. Write automated tests.
2. Write user documentation.

True, they arent coding standards.

Basically, no bugfix should ever be checked into CVS without a
corresponding test. No new feature is finished without automated tests and
updates to the documentation. Whenever I've strayed from fanatical
adherence to these rules I've regretted it.

To make writing documentation easy, I've been using AFT.

For tests, I'm not using JUnit because I wanted users to be able to run the
tests without downloading it. Also I think JUnits a bit bloated. If you
guys love JUnit and think I'm trippin, we'll use JUnit.

For XML processing, I havn't been using JDOM, for the same "not wanting to
force people to download too much extra stuff" reason. But I'm a lot less
comfortable with this decision, since JDOM code is _so_ much prettier and
more maintainable. What does averyone else think?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current target platforms are:

Working Now:
============
DB2
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Oracle
Sybase
Interbase

Just Got Emailed Support For:
=============================
McKoi

Really Want To Support But Don't Have Installer For:
====================================================
MS SQL Server <-- top priority
Ingres
Informix

Be Nice:
========
HypersonicSQL
InstantDB
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
That should be more than enough to keep us busy :)

Peace

Gavin