I’m lazy. Any advantage an IDE has to offer me, I’ll try and oblige them the opportunity. At my last company I did an experiment with our service oriented architecture to utilize the IDE to do most of the wiring for me from the data access to the visual representation by working with typed datasets returned from web services and presenting them via data grids. This was excellent as the IDE was able to save me many lines of code. Based on that success, I’ve tried to let IDE’s do things for me that I could normally do on my own. The attractive part of this type of functionality is that it saves you time and handles the plumbing portion for you.

Enter eclipse, spring and hibernate. Currently I’m working with a team to port over a MicroStrategy driven reporting application to an open source alternative utilizing Postgresql and linux based servers. I gave eclipse and some its plug-ins a shot at handling the wire up of spring, hibernate and postgres using it’s wizard driven configuration. It worked as advertised for standard persistence operations of stuffing our POJO’s into postgresql. However, we needed to access the underlying JDBC connection contained in spring/hibernate’s session to kick off an Extraction, Transformation and Load operation after the persistence of a certain object For whatever reason – hibernate would not commit the operation of the ETL process.

The eclipse plugin configured spring’s applicationContext.xml file and a hibernate.cfg.xml file for storing the hibernate properties and wiring spring to hibernate. As a last ditch effort after wasting two days trouble shooting why the ETL wasn’t committing to the db, I scratched the generated configuration and hand wrote the applicationContext.xml and skipped the hibernate config file as I put that information in the spring context file. And as Dog the Bounty Hunter would say, “BLAM”! It worked as expected and the ETL processed perfectly.

The moral of the story is that while IDE’s have made great advances and help save you lots of time – be weary of them at the same time. It’s that whole Brave New World thing – if we could manufacture a breed of superior people to do task based jobs – what use would we be? Just because some tool can do something for you, doesn’t mean it does it better.