Jay McGavren’s Journal

Finally! Got past all the database and scheduler errors, and we’re talking to the remote Web service again. Good thing, ’cause my boss was starting to tap his foot.

I can’t tell you how frustrating our in-house ORM is to work with. Fifty different kinds of database objects, and you have to know the system right down to the guts to do anything. If you could just run the generator and use the resulting objects, you’d be fine, but that’s never the case in the real world - SQL has to be customized, lists have to be cached, and it’s all exposed to all but the most casual user.

Java: log.debug(”Found chain ‘” + chain + “‘ for property ‘” + propertyCode + “‘”);
Ruby: @log.debug “Found chain ‘#{chain}’ for property ‘#{property_code}’”

Those few extra characters may not seem like much, but they actually reduce the amount and detail of log statements I put in the code. They’re painful to type, and worse, painful to read.

Logging is fast taking a place next to unit testing in my essential toolbox. Anything that important needs to be as painless as possible.

A change to our vendor’s WSDL has me back to dinking around with wscompile and wsimport again. I think they’ve screwed up somewhere in their chain of a dozen XSD imports, ’cause I’m getting “already defined” errors. I don’t dare refer to any book published before 2006 for help, because it will be flat-out wrong. Argh - so, so frustrating.