David Van Couvering 's Blog

JavaOne Party Conversations on XML and JRuby

Well, I did go to the Derby UnBOF last night, good to see some of you there. It was quite hopping, and I got to see a lot of old friends and meet some new folks. I met some folks from an insurance company who told me that what they want out of a database tool and framework is the ability to map directly from XML into a database and then pull elements out of the XML tree directly from the database. We got into a discussion over the semantic dissonance between XML, which is hierarchical, and the relational model, which definitely is not. I proposed that perhaps the right approach is to use the law of transitivity (A=B and B=C means A=C) and make use of existing existing tools and APIs to go from XML to objects (JAXB) and then from objects to databases (JPA). The problem with this approach, of course, is performance -- you're doing two transformations instead of one, with the associated data copies. What do you think. Is tooling for direct mapping from XML to databases a high priority?

Also a great conversation with Charlie Nutter and Thomas Enebo from the JRuby team. I mentioned to them that although I like the instant feedback you get with dynamic languages like JavaScript (I haven't worked with Ruby yet), I don't like the number of code/run iterations you have to go through to debug basic issues around syntax and correctness, whereas with Java, because it is so strongly typed, if it compiles you have a very good chance it will run correctly.

Thomas argued that well, that may be true, but with Java you have to write so much more code to get the job done, and Charlie argued that getting it to compile and run is just the beginning of your development cycle -- something I have to think about further. I'm not sure Java vs. Ruby affects the effort to build an app beyond coding.

That said, they also said they are working hard on reducing the number of iterations for JRuby by giving as many hints as possible in the IDE. That's encouraging. People I talk to really like working in Ruby, so perhaps it's not as bad there as I have experienced in JavaScript. I'd love to hear your experience with this.

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