IREPORT, Hibernate Annotations, wasting all kinds of time

I was very excited to tryout IReport with Hibernate annotations. I've been using Hibernate Annotations for over a year now and I'm absolutely in love with them. I saw that IReport which is apparently a great way to create Jasper Reports, supported Hibernate with Annotations. After downloading, installing, I started up the app and was ready to be impressed.

Unfortunately, apparently, there is a bug which either makes this impossible http://www.jasperforge.org/sf/go/artf2703?nav=1, or if there is a solutions, Jasper Forge doesn't feel like sharing.

I'm really not sure why this would be. I see this periodically. One person reports a problem, then responses show up that are irrelevant, the original reporter plays along, but finally, no solutions are offered and the post goes dark. I can understand this sometimes, but when you're reporting a possible bug and the programming who is reporting it is obviously credible (as in the above post), why just go dark? If you really don't have an answer, then say so. If your a programmer on the project, have the curtsy to say "Hey, we're looking into it". Going dark is really the worst thing. It says to me "Gosh, we don't know and we don't care, we would care if it was easy to fix, but since it isn't...".

Should I buy the documentation? I thought about it, but what if IReport just doesn't plain work with Hibernate Annotations? Then what? Not only did I waste money and time I still don't have my solution.

Should I download the source code and try to fix it? Well, gosh, maybe, but what if someone is actually fixing this or there isn't a problem, just a simple configuration issue? Then I should have bought the docs instead.

by the way, I did try to contact Jasper Forge, but to no avail...

Oh well, on to something other than IReports, maybe next year...

Functional Programming (why not, everyone else has)

Functional Programming, what is it and why do I care? It seems like only yesterday when I didn't know anything about this and I was oh so happy. Ever since some crazy EMU student brought up Haskell, I've been lost in a sea of ideas and languages.

So far the very best resource that I've found for someone like me is "Functional Programming for the rest of us" at http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html.

This article explores functional programming from it's roots, giving a foundation to so many of us who feel like we woke up yesterday and all of sudden everyone's talking functional programming.

Another nice introduction is on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming

Our first customer

My friend Dianne Marsh said I should start blogging again. She told me to keep it short and sweet, so that's what I'm going to do (as much as possible).

Today's blog entry:

WE GOT OUR FIRST CUSTOMER WOO WOO!

Yes, just shy of our two year mark and about five months into selling, we finally got our first customer for summitmobilesolutions.com. We went into overdrive just over a month ago because we honestly couldn't understand our lack of sales. Now, after some course corrections, it looks like summit mobile solutions is moving in the right direction.