JPA and Optional Associations

I was writing some unit tests to test a few of my queries and noticed they were failing to return results (even though the resultant rows were clearly in the database). Looking into my changes, the only differences was that I recently added the EclipseLink eclipselink.join-fetch for two one-to-many relationships. From looking at the resultant SQL, it became clear what the problem was. By adding these join-fetch statements, my query became more efficient (since I didn't have subsequent row-by-row lazy fetches later), but it also became invalid in some circumstances. In particular, the fetch join added some AND statements to the WHERE clause whereby the foreign key id was equal to the primary table id. However if the many-side relationship is empty, then this statement will not return any rows. I think the way around this would be to box the AND statement in a compound OR statement with an exists condition. Currently to my knowledge the JPA implementations do not support this, and I am going to research whether or not this is achievable by manually modifying the join-fetch statement.

Refactoring Followup - Strange Side Effect

While I was quick to point out that my refactoring of my services end up being a little bit painful on the Swing Heavy-client side, when it came time to refactor my web-services client (currently a series of dedicated servlets used by my mobile devices) it was surprisingly a clean update. Why was this? What lesson can I pull from this. The main one was that the web-services code was very specific in its function which was mainly to parse the query parameters and marshall the appropriate calls to the service to obtain the results. Since I already had tests around the services calls, the main work I had to do with the refactor was re-insert a lot of the XML JAXB annotations to produce the appropriate XML output.

As an aside, while looking at MoXY with EclipseLink, I noticed their tools to assist in providing a true WebServices implementation. This might be an area to look into adopting (in providing a true JAX-WS implementation).

Refactoring: Biting off more than you can chew?

So as most can assert from reading my blog I have developed a stamp tracking software "suite" of tools. The core of this was based off a JPA implementation which was recently moved to EclipseLink. With some of the new tools available to Eclipse for use with JPA (in particular Dali), I decided to think about reorganizing my services and trying to streamline some of my code (Using MappedSuperClasses as abstract parents for example). I focussed on my StampModel module which had a pretty decent unit test coverage of around 80% (some of the code not covered include error handling and a lot of my upgrade code) and was also where all of my entities existed. I even created a bugzilla entry for this work so that I could track my progress. I estimated it would take me no more than 12 hours. Well, 30+ hours later I finally have repackaged, rewritten or revamped the module (and database tables). For the first time in nearly a week I was able to open my Swing based editor last night and manage my collection. I still have some outstanding issues, but my refactoring is pretty much complete. There are a couple of lessons I took away from this.

1. Never assume how long it will take. Invariably something will come up (and I have to admit the Olympics coverage may have pulled my attention away from eclipse on occasion).
2. When I started refactoring I relied on my unit tests and decided to make updates to the Swing client after refactoring was completed. This was a mistake as often I had to think back to what the update was rather than making the change immediately (I am thinking along the lines of repackaging, changing initialization code etc.) Overall these changes tended to be pretty simplistic (change package X to package Y) but occasionally a DAO that I did not particularly like in the previous module was changed. In one occasion, the new DAO did not really fit and I had to rewrite some controller code (but at least it is better now).
3. Part of my refactoring was to move my entities which were annotated to be orm.xml based. I should have done this first without changing the data-model. Changing the database schema along with moving the entities to orm.xml created a lot of thrashing to work through.

Certifications even for the experienced?

Those of you who know me know that I sometimes shun the world of academia. Not that I do not think education is useful. I do. I am the current holder of two bachelor degrees and numerous certifications and I can honestly say they have proven useful in my career. But too often I see a candidate interviewing at my company who has years of academic training (multiple bachelor degrees, masters degrees, certifications up the wazoo), but they can not solve a simple puzzle put in front of them, or they display a complete lack of communication skills. After I was Java certified in 2003, I decided that I would take additional Java certifications to advance my knowledge. To date this has not happened, largely because my life is considerably busier and I much prefer to tinker and explore technologies than read the official way of doing something. Attending conferences has also been a pleasure to increase my awareness of new technologies.

Recently while being disposed, I was flipping though a copy of the Web Component Developer prep-book put out by Manning some years ago. It was a decent book, and as I flipped through the pages I found myself reading up on the techologies that I used on a daily basis, as well as advise my teams in their use. I feel in general, dispite the maturity of many Web Component pieces (such as Servlet, TAGs and EL), I feel many developers really do not understand why they are using them, or when to use one technology (for example TAGs) over another (such as Servlets). I proposed to the team that reading a book on such a subject matter might prove useful for their benefit. As a technology leader, I therefore felt it only appropriate that I study and become a Sun Certified Web Component Developer.

So this leads me to the conclusion that I suppose I need to engage in the duties of reading a book (for this current challenge I have chosen Head First Servlets & JSP from O'Reilly covering the 2nd edition), preparing myself and actually taking the exam. Based on my study habits, the best motivator I can think of is to schedule the exam now, that way I have to be prepared prior to the actual "writing" of the exam.