A couple of new articles, and we're working with Java

Actually not quite, I’ve written a couple of articles, mainly for fellow students at the university. See, this semester, the year twos will be taking a module in software engineering, where we will be implementing a facility booking system in Java. Since the project requires us to work with Subversion and databases, I thought it was a good thing to write these two articles:

• Subversion, the right way
• Getting started with Hibernate 3 and NetBeans 6.5 Beta part 1

Do spread the word if you find them useful, and report any glaring errors or improvements if any. Apologies for still not having a commenting system up yet. Mainly because the last time I tried it, the code generated by the Radiant plug-in was not standards compliant. Since producing compliant markup is one of the competitive advantages we have at Tinkerbox, I decided against installing it.

I’ve had some experience with Java back in the polytechnic, but I was won over by the dark side with .Net and its popular C# language. Ken is also an awesome J2ME developer and is far more experienced than I am with Java. Right now, he wishes to develop some stuff on the iPhone but that’s another story.

While I still prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, I guess brushing up on my Java wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But then again, I miss the simplicity of ActiveRecord a lot. Most people think that Hibernate is more powerful, or more flexible, but I think ActiveRecord can hold its own. Yes, you might have to tweak a lot, but then again, it’s not going to end up more work than using Hibernate with all its configuration files (or annotations). Perhaps, I will be in a better position to comment after this semester’s done.