At the company I work for we’ve struggled for many weeks with using a commercial library for object to relational database mapping. It is supposed to hide the details of the database, make changes to the database easy (i.e. a change to a table doesn’t alter the code), and get caching of data as well. It has definitely not worked as we expected and in the end we are going to have to replace it.
Apparently in this day and age using simple SQL to access your data is just too arcane to speak of so you have to have some kind of tool to map your objects to a database. Two of the ones we are looking at are both from Apache:

• Torque
• ObjectRelationalBridge

I’m very interested to see whether either of these will make the job of moving data into and out of an application any easier.

Fun for the whole family. Build your very own safety signs with the SAFETY SIGN BUILDER. It’ll send you a nice PDF file with your sign in it so you can print it nice and large 🙂

It seems like any time Slashdot.org links to something they think is cool, the website immediately acquires around a million or so people banging on it. This is the “Slashdot Effect.”
When the reason Slashdot is sending you to a file is is because of a file they have for download, you can be pretty much assured that you aren’t going to be able to download it for a day or two because the poor victim of this can’t keep up with the load of all those people trying to download the same thing.
That’s why BitTorrent Files for Slashdot Effect Victims is really cool. BitTorrent is peer-to-peer software that allows you to download a single file from multiple other people at the same time and become another upload station at the same time. Once you’ve installed this software you can click on a link at the site and get the overloaded software quickly rather than slowly because all of those people trying to download at the same time on BitTorrent will actually speed things up rather than slow them down. So the “Slashdot Effect” will finally become a force for good rather than evil 🙂