bbweblog – Page 222 – Kev's Development Toolbox

August 3, 2005

Terrabyte of disk drive space now possible for desktop PCs

Wow. With the current latest Serial ATA drives (and also regular parallel ATA133 drives) now reaching 500GB, just two of these puppies in your desktop will give you a terrabyte of online storage.

This seems like an out of this world quantity of drive space, but with many home users filling their drives full of MP3s, digital photos, digitial movies, and the ever increasing size of (Microsoft) bloatware, 1,000GB doesn’t seem that crazy nowdays, although just a few years back this would have seen like science fiction.

And the price is not out of reach either. One 500GB drive from Hitachi will set you back somewhere between $380 – $430 (check current prices on http://www.pricewatch.com/

August 2, 2005

Building multi-criteria searches with Hibernate

DevX have a good article on how to use Hibernate’s Criteria Query support for building queries with multiple (and variable) search fields. This is a useful feature for building queries for web pages where the number of columns being queried against can vary depending on the users input.

August 1, 2005

UK company, Node, release prototype of ‘Hitchikers Guide’

A UK based company called Node has produced a prototype of an electric guide book, which in many ways is similar to the ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ from Douglas Adams’ book, except that it’s limited to only Earth…

August 1, 2005

To Layer or not to Layer – part 2

I had a great response from my article last week on the pros and cons of architectural layering, and it prompted quite a heated discussion on TheServerSide.com (and as a result took quite a few hits on my server that day!)

I think some people missed the point entirely though. I would never suggest for one minute that we should abandon architectural layering in the development of a large enterprise system, and even for smaller systems, layer is still good practice. My main point (and some people did pick up on this), was that as software architects and developers we need to be thinking how we can increase productivity by removing or hiding the plumbing code and overhead introduced from developing applications with multiple layers. My example of Ruby on Rails is achieving exactly this, and I think we have lessons to be learnt from looking at this approach.

I noticed after I posted the article last week that there is a project on java.net called Trails, which is a Java-based project similar in goals to Ruby on Rails. I haven’t looked at it in detail yet, but this looks like a promising step in the right direction.