Re:Let the Java vs RoR battles begin
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Really? If I understand it correctly, Grails is based on Groovy language - controllers and models are in Groovy, views are GSP, which means Groovy Server Pages. Groovy is 5x slower than Ruby and you still claim that framework written in Groovy will be faster than framework written in Ruby? That somehow doesn't make sense to me.
Firstly, Groovy simply isn't 5x slower than Ruby. Secondly, you are wrong - Grails is not based just on the Groovy language. It is based on Groovy scripting above Spring and Hibernate. It is as if much of ActiveRecord was written in C.
It's mainly comparison of Active Record and Hibernate and it doesn't prove anything about the whole performance of Rails vs. Grails.
Yes it does. Grails is based on Hibernate. As the article says, Hibernate has far better performance for serious work where the lazy loading of Rails is inappropriate and where complex joins are required.
Why would I do that? I'm not sure if Rails is the right tool for crunching 100,000 records in a single transaction, moreover routinely. It's intended for small to middle-sized web applications running usually short transactions and I would like to see a comparison of Rails vs. Grails on exactly that field.
Middle sized web applications aren't limited to running short transactions. Just to give an example, I have been working on a pretty small website (not that many pages), and there have to be regular price and stock availability updates. The complexity of this means hundreds of thousands of records have to be changed, and they have to be changed in a single transaction to avoid inconsistencies.
Making a show of Hibernate, Spring and tunability of Java means nothing to me.
Well, it should, because that kind of tunability is precisely what 'middle-sized web applications' need to deal with the typical range of features and load on such sites.
We can argue against the methodology used there, but it shows, unlike you, at least some numbers.
We certainly can argue against the methodology - it is nonsense. Visiting each page once, walking the entire application feature set, does not allow optimisation or cacheing to come into effect. What would be required would be revisiting pages many times.
I will probably have to do a comparison of Rails and Grails by myself, because your claims (Grails faster than Rails) are backed only on assumptions (Hibernate, Spring, Java thing etc.) and not on facts (real world benchmarks).
This simply isn't true. The real world facts are that Spring and Hibernate scale up to the kind of large systems with high demand and large transactions that Rails simply isn't designed for. That is a fact!
Benchmarks are a good idea, but would take time to set up. Something to bear in mind is that doing things like that example you showed isn't a good measure - the JVM requires time to optimise and cache.
Please give me some examples of positive feedback in nature occurring, today, things that we can observe happening now or experiments that can be done in a lab.
The melting of Artic ice and permafrost. As the ice melts, it is revealing less reflecting water, which absorbs more heat, melting more ice. This is happening right now.
A large disturbance of the climate, such as a meteor hit will cause the climate to stabilize in a relatively short time.
No, it doesn't. If you look at what happens, it can result in significant changes for a long time - millenia.
So you are wrong here.
The Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 had a significant effect on the earth's climate for only a short time.
The Krakatoa eruption was extremely minor by comparison with the volume of CO2 and dust we are ejecting long term. If you take a look at a bigger eruption, like that at Toba 70,000 years ago, it really did wreck the climate - it created a mini ice age.
So this claim is wrong.
One is that even the most powerful supercomputers are nowhere good enough to calculate the equations that we know apply.
Of course not - things are chaotic. This is why statistical ensembles are run.
Bottom line: Climate prediction is a dubious science with a large dose of faith.
Bottom line: That is just your wishful thinking, to avoid the truth. You can't simply put forward false statements like that about the meteor strike, and use that in attempt to claim you are right, and the mass of climate scientists are wrong. It is faith in the face of evidence.
(note that this doesn't apply to C# programs written with Visual studio, I'm not sure why C# runs under a VM considering that it was designed for Windows only)
It allows the same binaries to run on Windows on different processors -.NET developers don't need to worry about switching between 32 or 64-bit systems.
Java may not perform quite as fast as C/C++, but the difference is neglible, and is only noticable in applications requiring alot of processing.
Actually, it can be the other way around. The more processing, the more chance that the run-time profiling and optimising gets to work, the faster Java runs.
Java programs are however slower to start, since they require that the JVM be started and the JIT compilation to be performed.
The JVM starts fast, and modern Java does not require any JIT compilation before the program starts. Instead the interpreter starts running, and hotspot optimisation kicks in later.
The Swing toolkit, IMO, does a huge disfavor to Java in this regard. Because the entire toolkit is emulated, making the GUI slow, contributing to the general perception of Java as slow.
Was true years and years ago, not now. It isn't all emulated - Swing uses DirectX to write to displays on Windows, for example. I am not actually sure that 'emulated' is meaningful. Swing draws controls using the Windows graphics API. So does every other Windows app. These days, having custom controls is very common (just look at media players).
I much prefer the SWT toolkit, since it both integrates better with the native environment and performs better.
Not true any more either. SWT has a reputation for actually being slower than Swing on at least some platforms, such as X. (Anyway, what does 'native GUI' mean on X-Windows anyway?)
In fact most people wouldn't be able to tell a Java SWT app apart from a C/C++ GTK/Windows/Mac application.
With Java 6, the same is true for Swing - a lot of work has been put into that, especially with the Vista interface.
Which one? There is not just one JVM. There are JVMs that ARE written in Java, such as this http://joeq.sourceforge.net/
However, there is a good reason why most JVMs aren't written in Java - the highest performance Java implementations use run-time optimisations from within a JVM. So you would need a JVM to run the Java which would implement the JVM - which is recursive. You need to bootstrap things somehow.
I can't disagree more. Most programmers already know programming pretty well, and don't need their books on specific programming languages to be diluted with general programming instruction.
And I can't disagree more with this. Programmers who know programming pretty well are rare. A very large number stick with single language or two and are resistant to new approaches. Look how long it took for OOP to become mainstream, and I still read posts here from people who just can't see the point of it. There needs to be far wider tuition of general programming.
Re:Let the Java vs RoR battles begin
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It doesn't prove anything, that if there is Spring and Hibernation somewhere at the bottom of Grails, the whole thing will be fast.
I am puzzled as to why you say this. It is common practise in Ruby to drop through to C or C++ to improve speed. In Grails, you aren't just dropping through to Java - 99% of the framework is Java, and Java which is fast and scalable, and highly tunable in ways that Rails simply isn't.
You've made the bold clame that Grails is faster than Rails, so show us the bold proof (benchmarks, numbers...)!
Again, I am puzzled as to why this is supposed to be a bold claim. I suggest you read a detailed comparison of the two frameworks:
I would also suggest you attempt to run single transactions involving, say, 100,000 records in Rails and see what happens (something I do routinely).
Re:Thanks for the answer
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To be fair, most ORM tools prefer than your object model resemble your relational model.
Not all ORM tools are like Hibernate:)
I use JDO (Kodo) and it really doesn't care what your object model is like - and can persist and retrieve objects from a range of stores, not just relational. These include XML, CSV, LDAP and so on.
Re:Let the Java vs RoR battles begin
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What's wrong with ActiveRecord?
It is a great way to get things started, but has limited usefulness. It is intended primarily for 'greenfield' databases where you get to define everything, however a substantial fraction of database work involves connecting to existing databases, where the structures don't match the requirements of Rails. Also, defining a data model in what is supposed to be an OOP language in terms of relational database tables is..... just crap! Developers in other languages have moved on to defining their data models in terms of objects and then adding persistence.
The problem with the hype around Rails is that many developers can't see past the limitations.
Re:Let the Java vs RoR battles begin
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Any proof backing your claim? I hardly believe that something based on a language that is approx. 5x slower and 7x more memory hungry than Ruby will be "faster"
Absolutely. It is not so much a matter of Groovy, as the underlying framework. The framework underneath Grails is a combination of Spring and Hibernate, which are very high performance.
The question was rhetorical. In fact, Solaris has not been released as open source, only parts of it have been. Sun is playing word games again.
No, you are the one playing word games, with petty remarks like that.
"Therefore, by definition, Sun have already made a substantial contribution."
So what? I never said anything different"
yes you did:
"Sun has little credibility when it comes to open source"
)Maybe it is just me, but I suspect the millions who use products like Open Office may just disagree with you there)
You keep saying that, you simply fail to support your argument. What exactly has changed after the announcement?
That is irrelevant. You are the one making claims that the announcement is meaningless, you fail to support that.
If it was meaningless, it would not have resulted in significant statements from major figures in the industry. They would not have wasted their time.
Until Sun actually ships Java under an open source license, nothing has changed at all.
Nonsense. There have already been changes in the licenses of other Java products from other vendors (which has actually happened) because of the announcement.
You are, as I said, just playing tiresome word games.
You asked for some proof, I gave it to you. You then said that my proof was not valid, and you provided no proof of that assertion.
You need to realize that this is religion to you. You will not accept any proof I can give you, because you have an irrational belief. There is always a way to discount facts - but if you are doing that without any counter-proof, you are irrationally clinging to your original belief.
To put it simply, where is your evidence that food crops are more heat sensitive than every other plant on Earth
All you gave proof of was that plant life in general would increase as a result of CO2 increase.
That is not the same as food crops increasing in general as a result of global warming!
It is not just a matter of heat sensitivity, it is a matter of weather patterns. For example, if ocean currents change (as they well might), this could affect monsoons, resulting in droughts in Asia. Plants aren't going to be able to take advantage of that CO2 without water!
You are stuck with one single factor involved in global warming. Things are far more complicated than that.
However, if you want an actual example of how food crops are directly affected by temperature, look at this:
"Staple food crop harvests could drop dramatically in a warmer climate as plants produce less wheat or rice with smaller grains, scientists from the University of Reading have found from a study involving peanuts.
Very hot temperatures during the flowering period prevent seeds from forming properly, and lead to faster growth overall which does not allow grains the time to grow."
Do you see now why your discussion of CO2 concentrations is far too simple?
I believe the pertinent proof is that during periods of lower temperatures (such as following volcanic eruptions, etc.) we have less plant life. Global coolings leads to less plant life, so logicaly it follows that global warming would lead to higher plant life. In addition, looking at the historical record of the Earth, periods hotter than now have more plant life.
This is described somewhat by Nasa.
OK, now that there is proof on the table, can you change your world view - or is this a religion to you?
That is proof of higher quantities of plant life, but not higher quantities of food crops. The growth of food crops depends critically on certain temperature regimes and rainfall patterns.
The majority of CO2 is taken up by plant life and photosynthetic bacteria in the sea, and they are not easy to harvest!
Re:It's nice for little things.
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What makes you think that software needs to be "compiled" for large projects? Yahoo is primarily delivered with PHP. Amazon.com is largely Perl. MySpace is largely ColdFusion (migrating to.NET).
Firstly, those companies don't do everything in those languages - there is a lot of integration with other frameworks. Secondly, using that approach is fine if you have the resources of those companies. For the typical developer it is a mess. Thirdly, note how MySpace is moving to.NET.
All green houses and all so called green house gases and agents can only keep solar energy in that has been absorbed. As the average temperature of the atmosphere rises, more water evaporates. This water eventually makes for more and much thicker clouds which are excellent reflectors of light.
Wrong.
Light from the sun that is reflected back into space cannot warm anything. If nothing gets warmed, then all the greenhouse gases have no heat to trap. This reflection effect combined with the higher water content of the atmosphere has the tendency to put the brakes onto global warming.
Only to an extent. What you are forgetting is that not all the water that evaporates turns into clouds - clouds are a result of condensation.
If the greenhouse gases doubled or tripled the rise in temperature and the ice meltdown is not anywhere near what it is imagined to be by simple minded computer models.
Simple minded computer models aren't being used.
Climate is an exceedingly complex negative feedback system, with many of its parameters unknown and very hard to determine. However, negative feedback tends to make for stability of any system. That includes the earth's average temperature control system.
And positive feedback tends to make for instability. We know that positive feedback in climate is very common through Earth's history as there have been periods much warmer and much colder than now, as positive feedback in the directions of cooling and then warming have come into play.
The mechanisms you suggest for negative feedback simply haven't worked in the past - why should they work now?
Java will be open source once it has been released under that license, not a second sooner.
Well, obviously, unless some is in possession of some sort of time warp technology. But that is not the point. The point was that the announcement was not "meaningless".
Really? All of it? Or just some of it? Who can even tell.
All you need to do is look.
Yes, RMS is saying that after they have done the open source release, then that will be true. And it doesn't mean that anybody has to like Sun anymore than before. Sun made a strategic decision; you can bet that if they can screw other open source projects, they still will.
RMS was not saying that only until after Java is open sourced will Sun have made ANY contribution to open source, what he said was that after Java is open sourced, that, together with everything else, will have made Sun the BIGGEST contributor. Java alone would not have achieved that. Therefore, by definition, Sun have already made a substantial contribution. This has included products such as Open Office - the killer application for desktop Linux.
Re:Let the Java vs RoR battles begin
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Grails is used. It is faster that RoR, and unlike Rails, they are targetting all scales of application, from the smallest to the enterprise scale. Also, it avoids the ActiveRecord pattern, allowing easy database independence, and allowing you to define your data model in classes, rather than having to work with database schemas (although you can do that too).
Just because it gets warmer at the polar regions doesn't mean it has to get correspondingly hotter in the tropics. The small presently observed warming that everybody is talking about is affecting those cold places, but has no discernible effect in the tropical lands or seas.
You spoke about an average rise of 10C that would certainly have a dramatic effect in the tropical lands.
And if you don't think that temperature changes in the poles don't affect tropical lands, you don't know climate.
When warm moist air from the oceans hits land, it rises and therefore cools. That cooling causes the water to precipitate. If it cold enough such in the polar regions, it makes snow which piles up into ice.
But that isn't happening, or at least not as much as it used to. This is because it is not as cold as it used to be in the polar regions.
The Permian extinction was possibly caused by average rise of 10C.
The average temperature of earth is determined by solar output and how much heat from the sun gets to the surface and how much radiates away again. When the oceans get warmer, more water evaporates and there are more clouds which reflect sunlight. That puts a damper on further heating. That is a negative feedback effect.
There is only so much water the air can hold, and methane is an extremely strong greenhouse gas - it easily counteracts the cloud effect. Note that water is also a greenhouse gas - in addition to reflecting some sunlight, it also keeps heat in.
Also, the decreasing area of ice over the poles leads to less reflection - another positive feedback.
They are "meaningless" in that nothing changes for users until they actually deliver.
Not true, of course. It means that many developers who want to stick with open source can work with Java knowing that in a matter of months, it will be open. They can change policies now.
And that interpretation is already assuming that they are actually being honest and that no problems crop up. Given what happened with Java standardization and the tricks they have been playing with Solaris, Sun has little credibility when it comes to open source.
Well, firstly, Solaris is certainly open source, and secondly, they have been declared not just credible when it comes to open source, but more credible than any other company by Richard Stallman. I quote: "Sun will have contributed more than any other company to free software." I think that on such matters, he knows what he is talking about. He does not think this announcement is meaningless. Neither to Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly books, or Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu.
I can dream though that perhaps the more Oracle limits the options available for using their systems, more people/organizations will consider alternatives to their products (i.e. Postgres or MySQL). My personal philosophy is that I choose not to use products that limit how/where I can use them.
That is fine, and there is an easy way to avoid the trap - develop for your database using a high-quality ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool that abstracts away the database differences. Hibernate is popular, or I use JDO (either Kodo or JPOX). This is not some ideal - it really works, and works efficiently. I'm currently working on a large application which will end up with hundreds of tables. I need only change a few lines in the mappings to switch between PostgreSQL and Oracle. The mapping tool will do all the work for you, including generating efficient, indexed and constrained database schemas from your object models.
Those extensive floating ice fields would have to melt first, before the land based ice would even begin to melt.
No, not true. The floating ice fields don't somehow keep the land ice warm.
All that added water then precipitates out over the land.
Says who? That depends on a lot - wind directions, ocean currents.
That means that ice could actually build up on the colder, elevated locations of the planet, lowering the level of the seas.
Well that isn't happening. On those colder elevated locations, ice is currently disappearing.
It is a fact that a warmer atmosphere can hold much more water in suspension which would more than compensate for any melting ice masses on land.
I thought you said all that evaporated water had to come out on land? Instead, it can remain in the warmer air.
Water both in vapor and liquid forms has a huge heat storing capacity. Warm moist air and warmer ocean currents would affect the climate much more in the now colder parts of earth than the tropics. We see a demonstration of this in how the Gulf Stream keeps most of Europe much warmer in winter than comparable latitudes elsewhere.
Unless the melting of Artic and Greenland ice alters the salinity of the North Atlantic to the point at which ocean currents are changed - then Europe could get a LOT colder, even though the rest of the world was warming up. Real global warming, say 10degC or so would greatly increase the habitable land area for both man and beast.
I think not. That would mean significant areas of the world with temperatures regularly hitting 50C in summer.
One of the possible causes of the Permian extinction 250 million years ago was a 10C temperature rise. That wiped out almost all species.
I don't think any of our Canadian friends would object to orange groves in their northern territories.
Those groves could be full of USA migrants who have abandoned the new deserts where the praries used to be.
There is no indication that we are headed for that sort of warming any time soon.
We could well be. A temperature rise of 5C could be enough to start a positive feedback of warming due to the release of methane from oceanic hydrates. That could easily push things up by another 5C.
I'm not as excited about this as 5. What are the main new features?
Performance improvements, scripting interface, far better native look-and-feels, much improved debugging and profiling (far easier to connect tools with any running program), lots of XML and web services stuff.
Carbon is what plants are made of. They get carbon from CO2. global warming (in this context) implies greater levels of CO2 (that's the theory for the cause after all, and wht some people would like to see reduced). Hence global warming would naively lead to better plant growth and hence better crop yields.
There is more to global warming that CO2 increase - there is also warming. This inevitably results in climate change, with no guarantee that this change will lead to increased crop yields. Patterns of winds and rainfall are very delicate.
You'll know it when it happens, because that's when Linux distributions will start including it in their "free" portions. Until then, the announcement is meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? If I understand it correctly, Grails is based on Groovy language - controllers and models are in Groovy, views are GSP, which means Groovy Server Pages. Groovy is 5x slower than Ruby and you still claim that framework written in Groovy will be faster than framework written in Ruby? That somehow doesn't make sense to me.
Firstly, Groovy simply isn't 5x slower than Ruby. Secondly, you are wrong - Grails is not based just on the Groovy language. It is based on Groovy scripting above Spring and Hibernate. It is as if much of ActiveRecord was written in C.
It's mainly comparison of Active Record and Hibernate and it doesn't prove anything about the whole performance of Rails vs. Grails.
Yes it does. Grails is based on Hibernate. As the article says, Hibernate has far better performance for serious work where the lazy loading of Rails is inappropriate and where complex joins are required.
Why would I do that? I'm not sure if Rails is the right tool for crunching 100,000 records in a single transaction, moreover routinely. It's intended for small to middle-sized web applications running usually short transactions and I would like to see a comparison of Rails vs. Grails on exactly that field.
Middle sized web applications aren't limited to running short transactions. Just to give an example, I have been working on a pretty small website (not that many pages), and there have to be regular price and stock availability updates. The complexity of this means hundreds of thousands of records have to be changed, and they have to be changed in a single transaction to avoid inconsistencies.
Making a show of Hibernate, Spring and tunability of Java means nothing to me.
Well, it should, because that kind of tunability is precisely what 'middle-sized web applications' need to deal with the typical range of features and load on such sites.
We can argue against the methodology used there, but it shows, unlike you, at least some numbers.
We certainly can argue against the methodology - it is nonsense. Visiting each page once, walking the entire application feature set, does not allow optimisation or cacheing to come into effect. What would be required would be revisiting pages many times.
I will probably have to do a comparison of Rails and Grails by myself, because your claims (Grails faster than Rails) are backed only on assumptions (Hibernate, Spring, Java thing etc.) and not on facts (real world benchmarks).
This simply isn't true. The real world facts are that Spring and Hibernate scale up to the kind of large systems with high demand and large transactions that Rails simply isn't designed for. That is a fact!
Benchmarks are a good idea, but would take time to set up. Something to bear in mind is that doing things like that example you showed isn't a good measure - the JVM requires time to optimise and cache.
C# doesn't run in a VM. The code is compiled to MSIL then JIT compiled to machine code during execution. There is no concept of a Virtual Machine.
i me
.NET initiative."
This isn't true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Runt
"Common Language Runtime (CLR) is the name chosen by Microsoft for the virtual machine component of their
Just because you have JIT compilation does not mean you aren't using a VM. The combination of VM and JIT has been around for decades.
Please give me some examples of positive feedback in nature occurring, today, things that we can observe happening now or experiments that can be done in a lab.
The melting of Artic ice and permafrost. As the ice melts, it is revealing less reflecting water, which absorbs more heat, melting more ice. This is happening right now.
A large disturbance of the climate, such as a meteor hit will cause the climate to stabilize in a relatively short time.
No, it doesn't. If you look at what happens, it can result in significant changes for a long time - millenia.
So you are wrong here.
The Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 had a significant effect on the earth's climate for only a short time.
The Krakatoa eruption was extremely minor by comparison with the volume of CO2 and dust we are ejecting long term. If you take a look at a bigger eruption, like that at Toba 70,000 years ago, it really did wreck the climate - it created a mini ice age.
So this claim is wrong.
One is that even the most powerful supercomputers are nowhere good enough to calculate the equations that we know apply.
Of course not - things are chaotic. This is why statistical ensembles are run.
Bottom line: Climate prediction is a dubious science with a large dose of faith.
Bottom line: That is just your wishful thinking, to avoid the truth. You can't simply put forward false statements like that about the meteor strike, and use that in attempt to claim you are right, and the mass of climate scientists are wrong. It is faith in the face of evidence.
(note that this doesn't apply to C# programs written with Visual studio, I'm not sure why C# runs under a VM considering that it was designed for Windows only)
.NET developers don't need to worry about switching between 32 or 64-bit systems.
It allows the same binaries to run on Windows on different processors -
Java may not perform quite as fast as C/C++, but the difference is neglible, and is only noticable in applications requiring alot of processing.
Actually, it can be the other way around. The more processing, the more chance that the run-time profiling and optimising gets to work, the faster Java runs.
Java programs are however slower to start, since they require that the JVM be started and the JIT compilation to be performed.
The JVM starts fast, and modern Java does not require any JIT compilation before the program starts. Instead the interpreter starts running, and hotspot optimisation kicks in later.
The Swing toolkit, IMO, does a huge disfavor to Java in this regard. Because the entire toolkit is emulated, making the GUI slow, contributing to the general perception of Java as slow.
Was true years and years ago, not now. It isn't all emulated - Swing uses DirectX to write to displays on Windows, for example. I am not actually sure that 'emulated' is meaningful. Swing draws controls using the Windows graphics API. So does every other Windows app. These days, having custom controls is very common (just look at media players).
I much prefer the SWT toolkit, since it both integrates better with the native environment and performs better.
Not true any more either. SWT has a reputation for actually being slower than Swing on at least some platforms, such as X. (Anyway, what does 'native GUI' mean on X-Windows anyway?)
In fact most people wouldn't be able to tell a Java SWT app apart from a C/C++ GTK/Windows/Mac application.
With Java 6, the same is true for Swing - a lot of work has been put into that, especially with the Vista interface.
The JVM isn't written in Java.
Which one? There is not just one JVM. There are JVMs that ARE written in Java, such as this http://joeq.sourceforge.net/
However, there is a good reason why most JVMs aren't written in Java - the highest performance Java implementations use run-time optimisations from within a JVM. So you would need a JVM to run the Java which would implement the JVM - which is recursive. You need to bootstrap things somehow.
I can't disagree more. Most programmers already know programming pretty well, and don't need their books on specific programming languages to be diluted with general programming instruction.
And I can't disagree more with this. Programmers who know programming pretty well are rare. A very large number stick with single language or two and are resistant to new approaches. Look how long it took for OOP to become mainstream, and I still read posts here from people who just can't see the point of it. There needs to be far wider tuition of general programming.
It doesn't prove anything, that if there is Spring and Hibernation somewhere at the bottom of Grails, the whole thing will be fast.
t ss?l=RailsHibernate
I am puzzled as to why you say this. It is common practise in Ruby to drop through to C or C++ to improve speed. In Grails, you aren't just dropping through to Java - 99% of the framework is Java, and Java which is fast and scalable, and highly tunable in ways that Rails simply isn't.
You've made the bold clame that Grails is faster than Rails, so show us the bold proof (benchmarks, numbers...)!
Again, I am puzzled as to why this is supposed to be a bold claim. I suggest you read a detailed comparison of the two frameworks:
http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.
I would also suggest you attempt to run single transactions involving, say, 100,000 records in Rails and see what happens (something I do routinely).
To be fair, most ORM tools prefer than your object model resemble your relational model.
:)
Not all ORM tools are like Hibernate
I use JDO (Kodo) and it really doesn't care what your object model is like - and can persist and retrieve objects from a range of stores, not just relational. These include XML, CSV, LDAP and so on.
What's wrong with ActiveRecord?
It is a great way to get things started, but has limited usefulness. It is intended primarily for 'greenfield' databases where you get to define everything, however a substantial fraction of database work involves connecting to existing databases, where the structures don't match the requirements of Rails. Also, defining a data model in what is supposed to be an OOP language in terms of relational database tables is..... just crap! Developers in other languages have moved on to defining their data models in terms of objects and then adding persistence.
The problem with the hype around Rails is that many developers can't see past the limitations.
Any proof backing your claim? I hardly believe that something based on a language that is approx. 5x slower and 7x more memory hungry than Ruby will be "faster"
Absolutely. It is not so much a matter of Groovy, as the underlying framework. The framework underneath Grails is a combination of Spring and Hibernate, which are very high performance.
The question was rhetorical. In fact, Solaris has not been released as open source, only parts of it have been. Sun is playing word games again.
No, you are the one playing word games, with petty remarks like that.
"Therefore, by definition, Sun have already made a substantial contribution."
So what? I never said anything different"
yes you did:
"Sun has little credibility when it comes to open source"
)Maybe it is just me, but I suspect the millions who use products like Open Office may just disagree with you there)
You keep saying that, you simply fail to support your argument. What exactly has changed after the announcement?
That is irrelevant. You are the one making claims that the announcement is meaningless, you fail to support that.
If it was meaningless, it would not have resulted in significant statements from major figures in the industry. They would not have wasted their time.
Until Sun actually ships Java under an open source license, nothing has changed at all.
Nonsense. There have already been changes in the licenses of other Java products from other vendors (which has actually happened) because of the announcement.
You are, as I said, just playing tiresome word games.
You asked for some proof, I gave it to you. You then said that my proof was not valid, and you provided no proof of that assertion.
You need to realize that this is religion to you. You will not accept any proof I can give you, because you have an irrational belief. There is always a way to discount facts - but if you are doing that without any counter-proof, you are irrationally clinging to your original belief.
To put it simply, where is your evidence that food crops are more heat sensitive than every other plant on Earth
All you gave proof of was that plant life in general would increase as a result of CO2 increase.
That is not the same as food crops increasing in general as a result of global warming!
It is not just a matter of heat sensitivity, it is a matter of weather patterns. For example, if ocean currents change (as they well might), this could affect monsoons, resulting in droughts in Asia. Plants aren't going to be able to take advantage of that CO2 without water!
You are stuck with one single factor involved in global warming. Things are far more complicated than that.
However, if you want an actual example of how food crops are directly affected by temperature, look at this:
http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=12354
"Staple food crop harvests could drop dramatically in a warmer climate as plants produce less wheat or rice with smaller grains, scientists from the University of Reading have found from a study involving peanuts.
Very hot temperatures during the flowering period prevent seeds from forming properly, and lead to faster growth overall which does not allow grains the time to grow."
Do you see now why your discussion of CO2 concentrations is far too simple?
I believe the pertinent proof is that during periods of lower temperatures (such as following volcanic eruptions, etc.) we have less plant life. Global coolings leads to less plant life, so logicaly it follows that global warming would lead to higher plant life. In addition, looking at the historical record of the Earth, periods hotter than now have more plant life.
This is described somewhat by Nasa.
OK, now that there is proof on the table, can you change your world view - or is this a religion to you?
That is proof of higher quantities of plant life, but not higher quantities of food crops. The growth of food crops depends critically on certain temperature regimes and rainfall patterns.
The majority of CO2 is taken up by plant life and photosynthetic bacteria in the sea, and they are not easy to harvest!
What makes you think that software needs to be "compiled" for large projects? Yahoo is primarily delivered with PHP. Amazon.com is largely Perl. MySpace is largely ColdFusion (migrating to .NET).
.NET.
Firstly, those companies don't do everything in those languages - there is a lot of integration with other frameworks. Secondly, using that approach is fine if you have the resources of those companies. For the typical developer it is a mess. Thirdly, note how MySpace is moving to
All green houses and all so called green house gases and agents can only keep solar energy in that has been absorbed. As the average temperature of the atmosphere rises, more water evaporates. This water eventually makes for more and much thicker clouds which are excellent reflectors of light.
Wrong.
Light from the sun that is reflected back into space cannot warm anything. If nothing gets warmed, then all the greenhouse gases have no heat to trap. This reflection effect combined with the higher water content of the atmosphere has the tendency to put the brakes onto global warming.
Only to an extent. What you are forgetting is that not all the water that evaporates turns into clouds - clouds are a result of condensation.
If the greenhouse gases doubled or tripled the rise in temperature and the ice meltdown is not anywhere near what it is imagined to be by simple minded computer models.
Simple minded computer models aren't being used.
Climate is an exceedingly complex negative feedback system, with many of its parameters unknown and very hard to determine. However, negative feedback tends to make for stability of any system. That includes the earth's average temperature control system.
And positive feedback tends to make for instability. We know that positive feedback in climate is very common through Earth's history as there have been periods much warmer and much colder than now, as positive feedback in the directions of cooling and then warming have come into play.
The mechanisms you suggest for negative feedback simply haven't worked in the past - why should they work now?
Java will be open source once it has been released under that license, not a second sooner.
Well, obviously, unless some is in possession of some sort of time warp technology. But that is not the point. The point was that the announcement was not "meaningless".
Really? All of it? Or just some of it? Who can even tell.
All you need to do is look.
Yes, RMS is saying that after they have done the open source release, then that will be true. And it doesn't mean that anybody has to like Sun anymore than before. Sun made a strategic decision; you can bet that if they can screw other open source projects, they still will.
RMS was not saying that only until after Java is open sourced will Sun have made ANY contribution to open source, what he said was that after Java is open sourced, that, together with everything else, will have made Sun the BIGGEST contributor. Java alone would not have achieved that. Therefore, by definition, Sun have already made a substantial contribution. This has included products such as Open Office - the killer application for desktop Linux.
Grails is used. It is faster that RoR, and unlike Rails, they are targetting all scales of application, from the smallest to the enterprise scale. Also, it avoids the ActiveRecord pattern, allowing easy database independence, and allowing you to define your data model in classes, rather than having to work with database schemas (although you can do that too).
Just because it gets warmer at the polar regions doesn't mean it has to get correspondingly hotter in the tropics. The small presently observed warming that everybody is talking about is affecting those cold places, but has no discernible effect in the tropical lands or seas.
You spoke about an average rise of 10C that would certainly have a dramatic effect in the tropical lands.
And if you don't think that temperature changes in the poles don't affect tropical lands, you don't know climate.
When warm moist air from the oceans hits land, it rises and therefore cools. That cooling causes the water to precipitate. If it cold enough such in the polar regions, it makes snow which piles up into ice.
But that isn't happening, or at least not as much as it used to. This is because it is not as cold as it used to be in the polar regions.
The Permian extinction was possibly caused by average rise of 10C.
The average temperature of earth is determined by solar output and how much heat from the sun gets to the surface and how much radiates away again. When the oceans get warmer, more water evaporates and there are more clouds which reflect sunlight. That puts a damper on further heating. That is a negative feedback effect.
There is only so much water the air can hold, and methane is an extremely strong greenhouse gas - it easily counteracts the cloud effect. Note that water is also a greenhouse gas - in addition to reflecting some sunlight, it also keeps heat in.
Also, the decreasing area of ice over the poles leads to less reflection - another positive feedback.
They are "meaningless" in that nothing changes for users until they actually deliver.
Not true, of course. It means that many developers who want to stick with open source can work with Java knowing that in a matter of months, it will be open. They can change policies now.
And that interpretation is already assuming that they are actually being honest and that no problems crop up. Given what happened with Java standardization and the tricks they have been playing with Solaris, Sun has little credibility when it comes to open source.
Well, firstly, Solaris is certainly open source, and secondly, they have been declared not just credible when it comes to open source, but more credible than any other company by Richard Stallman. I quote: "Sun will have contributed more than any other company to free software." I think that on such matters, he knows what he is talking about. He does not think this announcement is meaningless. Neither to Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly books, or Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu.
I can dream though that perhaps the more Oracle limits the options available for using their systems, more people/organizations will consider alternatives to their products (i.e. Postgres or MySQL). My personal philosophy is that I choose not to use products that limit how/where I can use them.
That is fine, and there is an easy way to avoid the trap - develop for your database using a high-quality ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool that abstracts away the database differences. Hibernate is popular, or I use JDO (either Kodo or JPOX). This is not some ideal - it really works, and works efficiently. I'm currently working on a large application which will end up with hundreds of tables. I need only change a few lines in the mappings to switch between PostgreSQL and Oracle. The mapping tool will do all the work for you, including generating efficient, indexed and constrained database schemas from your object models.
Those extensive floating ice fields would have to melt first, before the land based ice would even begin to melt.
No, not true. The floating ice fields don't somehow keep the land ice warm.
All that added water then precipitates out over the land.
Says who? That depends on a lot - wind directions, ocean currents.
That means that ice could actually build up on the colder, elevated locations of the planet, lowering the level of the seas.
Well that isn't happening. On those colder elevated locations, ice is currently disappearing.
It is a fact that a warmer atmosphere can hold much more water in suspension which would more than compensate for any melting ice masses on land.
I thought you said all that evaporated water had to come out on land? Instead, it can remain in the warmer air.
Water both in vapor and liquid forms has a huge heat storing capacity. Warm moist air and warmer ocean currents would affect the climate much more in the now colder parts of earth than the tropics. We see a demonstration of this in how the Gulf Stream keeps most of Europe much warmer in winter than comparable latitudes elsewhere.
Unless the melting of Artic and Greenland ice alters the salinity of the North Atlantic to the point at which ocean currents are changed - then Europe could get a LOT colder, even though the rest of the world was warming up.
Real global warming, say 10degC or so would greatly increase the habitable land area for both man and beast.
I think not. That would mean significant areas of the world with temperatures regularly hitting 50C in summer.
One of the possible causes of the Permian extinction 250 million years ago was a 10C temperature rise. That wiped out almost all species.
I don't think any of our Canadian friends would object to orange groves in their northern territories.
Those groves could be full of USA migrants who have abandoned the new deserts where the praries used to be.
There is no indication that we are headed for that sort of warming any time soon.
We could well be. A temperature rise of 5C could be enough to start a positive feedback of warming due to the release of methane from oceanic hydrates. That could easily push things up by another 5C.
I'm not as excited about this as 5. What are the main new features?
Performance improvements, scripting interface, far better native look-and-feels, much improved debugging and profiling (far easier to connect tools with any running program), lots of XML and web services stuff.
Carbon is what plants are made of. They get carbon from CO2. global warming (in this context) implies greater levels of CO2 (that's the theory for the cause after all, and wht some people would like to see reduced). Hence global warming would naively lead to better plant growth and hence better crop yields.
There is more to global warming that CO2 increase - there is also warming. This inevitably results in climate change, with no guarantee that this change will lead to increased crop yields. Patterns of winds and rainfall are very delicate.
Also, just because Sun says that they are going to do it doesn't mean it's going to go through without problems.
My point was that it was extreme to say that say that claims that Java will be open sourced are "meaningless".
If Sun say they are going to do it, they are going to do it, problems or not. Their statement that they are doing this is hardly "meaningless".
You'll know it when it happens, because that's when Linux distributions will start including it in their "free" portions. Until then, the announcement is meaningless.
That is a bit extreme, perhaps?