Tipjar - we gotta move!
rzwitserloot posted in startup, programming on March 14th, 2006
Random check at the success of the tipjar idea: It’s currently the highest rated comment on an article by Shirky about how (mandatory) micropayments will always fail. I didn’t make that comment, someone else did.
I’m more and more convinced that we’re “on the clock” as it were. This idea is so great, it’s really just a matter of time before someone else runs with it.
In other words, I’m so utterly convinced we need to move move move on this, I’ve given in; Cris wants PHP or some similar slapdash language - we’ll go slapdash language. Anything to get a prototype out the door. Once a real use case crystallises out of what users actually do with a tipjar service, I’ll just rewrite it in hibernate/trails, RoR, or whatever robust simple web-framework is available then.
I’m mostly concerned about banking and security issues. We are dealing with payment here. Any code stuck together with spit and a prayer offends the security hobbyist inside me greatly.
Speaking of robustness, just read an interesting article about the horrors of ORM libraries. Makes one wonder how the ORM of i.e. django can ever scale up far enough to stick with tipjar in the event that it does take off big.
The answer is probably simply that any toolkit made by oracle is such a bureaucratic debacle that they managed to turn a relatively manageable problem into an utter mess, but ORM -sounds- like it should be difficult to build in such a way that it scales well.
March 14th, 2006 at 12:42
What comment?
The more I look at the ORM that is out there, the more TOPspin with its Expressions and QueryDefinitions strikes me as a decent (and tested) alternative.
March 14th, 2006 at 13:29
Forgot to add the link. Story’s been updated. Here’s the link again:
http://reddit.com/info?id=30q2
still highest rates comment by the way.
March 15th, 2006 at 23:22
Oh, I just read it, the ORM article is completely bogus and crap. Pages of some lunatic drivelling how horrible his Oracle product (TopLink) and Oracle database have gotten.
This comes with the deal. Oracle is a pain for developers but everybody who’s ‘enterprise’ uses it so it’s big business. The guy is getting paid more than your average database programmer so he shouldn’t be whining.
Kuro5hin comments are pretty positive about Hibernate which I would definitely take a look at if I were programming Java and on Python SQLobject has never let me down (and caused me a hell of a lot less frustration than Django’s flavor).
March 16th, 2006 at 1:16
Hibernate is still pretty heavy. Some of these ORM things are just valid. There is a signficant disconnect between object structures and databases eventhough on initial glance they may look similar.
It would have been nice if TOPspin (the database layer of my former employer, TOPdesk was available as a stand-alone thing. It’s sort of a wrapper around SQL, offering database independence, an object model for SQL statements, some fairly smart intelligence for generating appropriate WHERE clauses and such, but it’s not an ORM layer. You still get resultsets which you manually walk through. You still manually specify the types of JOIN that you want.
Fortunately, for startup shops, you really do not need database independence, which makes straight SQL/JDBC work fairly doable.