Ease of Data Access

Summer is here, and when you live as far north as I live, that means you get out and enjoy the great outdoors every chance you get. I devote much more time to learning new technology and programming during the winter months. That being said, I will be devoting some hours to learning Sun's web platform this summer. Phobos and Jmaki in particular. So far I have found Phobos and Jmaki very easy to work with. I find it extremely easy to use Java objects as well. I am looking forward to the final release of Netbeans 6.

There are a few issues that I think would help Phobos along. The first being that a simple data pipe is needed. Every user has data. Every simple website has data. In order for someone to find the whole platform easy to work with, there needs to be a simple data pipe. JPA is the new Java way of working with data. I agree that it is powerful and fast. However, there needs to be a simple pipe as well. Take the following scenario, someone has a database and they want to try Phobos out. If they had a simple data object that they could set a few properties, issue an sql statement, and get a data object back which they could then access to generate a presentation page, they would be successful getting there data and on to using Phobos to design an application. Now lets just say that they have trouble getting at their data, or something does not work right. Now they really have nothing to work with. They are now more likely to become frustrated and give up working with this new technology.

Now consider another scenario. The beginner user programs a simple data access page and now deploys it as a web app. However, because now it is running in the application environment, a data pool has to be configured to access your data. Now the beginner user is frustrated and stops using this new technology because they cannot figure out how to make the web app work on the application server. I know it is impossible to make a default pipe on every application server, but it would be help to have something be standard on at least one like Glassfish. There could always be a simple pipe out of the box, and then if you wanted more performance, you could complete the steps necessary to achieve that performance by using pools and/or JPA.

These all seem like minor issues to the average Java programmer, but for the beginner doing it for the first time, these can be huge issues. The JSF IDE builder in Netbeans is really RAD, but JSF programming is quite complex and far below scripting. The Phobos engine excels in simplicity, but a few added pieces of tooling would really make it fly. Data access just needs to work!

The devoted Visual Foxpro community on the Microsoft side was developed because of easy data access.

Phobos currently has a simple database library and also a JPA generator. These are pretty good, but I it still needs to be easier. The database library needs to be documented with some simple examples. The JPA generator is nice, but requires several steps. The Phobos team is doing a good job. I am sure better tooling is coming. Stay tuned!