Land of the Tiger

This is extremely disturbing news !! (Here's the Hindu and Deccan Herald version of the same story). 352 Tigers fall prey to poachers in the last 5 years! Why are these people killing tigers? Obviously for the money that accompanies a dead tiger. Its skin, teeth and nails fetch a lot of money.
How can we help? Well, sites like the http://www.tigerfdn.com and http://www.globaltigerpatrol.co.uk provide some information on how we can help. The most important thing to do is to stop buying such stuff and look down on people who do buy it (I would say... kill those bastards) .
Someday, I hope I would work like Valmik Thapar and Fateh Singh Rathore and help save the tiger. But until that day, I will have to write code to make a living :-).

PS :- Here's a gruesome video (taken from Anirudh's blog) which shows how animals are stripped of their fur to make fashionable dresses for us. I guess its high time for us to push back and stop supporting trading of fur, leather and other animal body parts.

Hibernate in Action

I have been trying to learn to use Hibernate over the last couple of days. After reading through the first 2 chapters in Hibernate In Action, I decided to try the "Message" example mentioned in the book. I used HSQLDB to persist the data. Initially I thought that we only needed to add the jdbc driver (i.e hsqldb.jar) and hibernate3.jar in the classpath. But then, a whole series of exceptions hit me in the face one after the other. Reading through the stack trace and resolving the exceptions one by one, I finally figured that the following jars need to be in the classpath for the program to run successfully.

• the jdbc driver (in my case hsqldb.jar)
• hibernate3.jar
• asm.jar
• cglib-2.1.jar
• commons-collections-2.1.1.jar
• commons-logging-1.0.4.jar
• log4j-1.2.9.jar
• jta.jar
• ehcache-1.1.jar
• dom4j-1.6.jar

All of these jars (except for the jdbc driver) come bundled with hibernate 3.0.

While specifying the configuration options for hibernate, we have 2 options --- either to use the hibernate.properties file or the hibernate.cfg.xml. There are subtle differences b/w these 2 methods :-

1) If you are using the hibernate.properties file --- While building the SessionFactory object, we don't need to call Configuration.configure() , but we do need to call Configuration.addResource() to specify the mapping files. i.e. --

Configuration configuration = new Configuration();
configuration.addResource("Messages/Message.hbm.xml");
SessionFactory sessionFactory = configuration.buildSessionFactory();

If you are using the C3P0 connection pool, you need to add c3p0-0.8.5.2.jar (comes with hibernate 3.0) to the classpath.

2) If you are using the hibernate.cfg.xml file --- While building the SessionFactory object, we do need to call Configuration.configure() , but we don't need to call Configuration.addResource() to specify the mapping files since we could specify it in hibernate.cfg.xml itself. i.e. --

Configuration configuration = new Configuration();
SessionFactory sessionFactory = configuration.configure().buildSessionFactory();

Hope this helps when you are writing your first hibernate program :-)