Keep It Simple, Stupid!

I've worked all weekend on the Patty analyzer and things are getting quite stable. It has been ported to Linux and Solaris in the meantime. It should now be in a state where people can actually start using it more thoroughly and depend on it.

Download: Patty

Other news is that things at work are also going smoothly. We've recently had a long port of entity beans to Hibernate and also an effort to move from an old JDK1.3.1 to JDK1.5.0. One of the most ugly hacks I've ever seen in that project were that Java code compiled for JDK1.3.1 was actually stored in the database and loaded through a custom classloader. *ugh*.

The title of this post refers to that... Just because you can store blobs and code in the database does not mean that you should. An "innovative" idea may be really cool to code in, but it certainly does not mean that it is a good solution. Far from it. And having 4 different executables with different names that all do something similar is really annoying too. Like the Oracle client installation or ClearCase.

Or projects with dependencies on large frameworks of 80MB in download size. Some of them having licenses or evaluation codes that you need to register for.

My objective with Patty is to make it a very simple thing to install and run. Download Tomcat 5.5 (around 7 MB in size), unzip and run it. Deploy 'drill.war' in there. Set up the agent library (42 - 160kB) in 5 minutes in a Java runscript and people should have a profiler ready for the project.