Answering questions at JavaRanch + free books

I am doing a session on Hibernate Search all this week at JavaRanch. Manning will give away free books of Hibernate Search in Action for the occasion.

If you have questions on Hibernate Search, express yourself :)

JBoss AS 5 is out, Hibernate Search 3.1, Devoxx is warming up and

Great news this week:

• JBoss AS 5 is out. Congratulations to Dimitris and the many people in and out of JBoss who contributed to it.


• Hibernate Search 3.1 is out. A lot of good stuffs like performance improvements at indexing and querying time and some cool new features like the analyzer declaration framework (allowing declarative phonetic, synonym, n-gram indexing and searches)


• Devoxx is very close. Come see the JBoss folks and topics and come to the Seam meetup after the BOF of course :)

Also, on the Bean Validation (JSR 303) side, I am finalizing the last changes in the spec for the public draft. We made a lot of progress in the last two weeks on various subjects including type-safe groups and JPA / JSF / EE integration (with the finalized draft, I will officially contact the EE expert group). Stay tuned, hopefully the draft should be out in a week or two.

Finally, Hibernate Search in Action is supposed to be released in final PDF monday (still not believing in it till I see that one ;) ).

Great week on my side. See you at Devoxx for a drink or two.

Hibernate Search 3.1 RefCard

DZone has a nice Hibernate Search 3.1 6-pages ref card. It is packed with:

• The list of annotations and their descriptions
• Hibernate Search's main APIs
• Lucene's most useful query types
• Quick examples involving mappings and API usage (including the new analyzer declaration framework)

It's free but you need to register.

Speaking of the devil. John and I have given back our last edits for Hibernate Search in Action. So we are still on target for releasing the book in december. I personally still can't believe I am done, so I will play the St Thomas and will wait till I can touch the paper :)

You can get the paper book at Amazon or on the Manning website. Manning also offers the PDF version.

Book review and NHibernate Search

Ayende, one of the active bees behind the NHibernate portfolio, has a nice review of Hibernate Search in Action on his blog.

By the way, Ayende has ported Hibernate Search to .net : NHibernate.Search. I don't think there is documentation specific to the project but the Hibernate Search documentation is just as useful.

I don't know Ayende personally, but I can only admire someone that blogs more that I can tweet and still have a full time job :)

Hibernate Search book preview final review: hitting where it hurts for the better

We just had our third review of Hibernate Search in Action. Receiving this feedback has been a humble experience. Lot's of good reviews (good) and some critical ones (even better). Every imperfection we left aside came back in the spot lights of our reviewers.

Based on this feedback, we have been working hard the last two weeks to improve a lot the manuscript:

• clearer code transcripts with more inline annotations
• better separation between different parts of the same example (Hibernate API versus Java Persistence API)
• the code has been updated to the latest Hibernate Search version and cleaned up a lot (no more warning, same comments as in the book)
• the code now contains README files for easier navigation, ant scripts, Eclipse and IntelliJ descriptors
• a nice appendix summarizing all annotations, Hibernate Search APIs and Lucene Query classes
• added an index: I wish I could plug Hibernate Search on the book, that one was painful
• added a section on testing (mocking, in-memory integration testing, performance testing)
• better explanation on how query and analyzer are interwoven
• add the Explanation API description
• clearer introduction for each chapter
• much more references than before making book navigation easier
• all references in the book are up to date. No more Chapter XX ;)
• improvements on the clustering chapter

The code is almost ready for prime time, we will publish it as soon as we find the right vehicle for it.

Thanks to all our reviewers. While I am not sure I appreciate the recent sleep depravation, this definitely improved the book a lot.

As usual, you can get the preview version electronically at Manning, it has all the chapters and I hope to get the latest changes uploaded soon.

JarInspector on Mac OS X

There is a tiny little utility that let's you inspect JAR/WAR/EAR files on the Mac OS platform. The software is available here. Install it. To open a JAR, simply right click and chose JarInspector as the application. I personally did not set JarInspector as my default .jar application to let the default JAR launcher kicks in but I have been very close to.

Amongst the useful features:

• navigate in your jars recursively
• edit/view files (useful for MANIFEST.MF)
• decompile a class
• find a file/class by name

By the way, this utility also opens zip files.

Enjoy.

Top 5 reasons why Out Of Office messages are wrong

I have always been annoyed quite a bit by automatic Out of Office messages. This summer was no exception. So here are my top reasons for not doing it.

1. Nobody cares about your trip is Egypt really! If I am sending you an email, I am not on vacations. Do you really want to piss me off?
2. Email is an asynchronous media. Nobody should expect a synchronous response. If you don't answer a message, a) you are not there b) you don't care: in both cases, there is no point in knowing you are having a good time with uncle Bobby  by the lake.
3. You pollute mailing lists. When someone, who probably don't even know you, send a message to a mailing list you are a member of, what do you think happen? He receives your vacations post card. Oh and since you are not the only one, he receives vacations cards from 20 other bozos as well.
4. People forget to disable the out of office message. When you receive a message claiming a person is meant to be back 4 days ago, you wonder if he has been fired or is dead.
5. Don't reply or send emails when you are in Out of Office Reply. There is nothing more frustrating than being asked a question by mail, reply within 5 minutes and receive a message like "I will not have access to my emails this week"

Please don't overuse this tool. If you need to set that kind of message, it means your organization has flaws.