Well I have no idea what this post is even about but I thought that it is just nice to have some more posts on ones blog, as well as somewhat more interesting for any potential readers.

So thats it for this week probably, tomorrow I'm going to the Retro game convention here in Malmö.

For the project I'm working on now we are using something called couchbase to store stuff. It works sort of like a database, but not really. Before I get into the rant let me just explain a little bit about couchbase.

There are three fundamental parts to couchbase: buckets, documents and views. Buckets can be compared to tables in a MySQL database (functionality-wise). Except that you don't/can't specify columns. A bucket is just a collection of docuements. Documents are where data is actually stored. And from my understanding a document is in fact just a key-value entry. The name of the document is the key and the value is the data itself. I think the data can be any form of data, but mostly it's a json object or a blob. And then finally there are views. I haven't really figured out how these views work but I have only used them as sort of an API for documents in a given bucket. You can create a view in which some javascript is run to fetch the correct data.

But the problem is that to improve performance (because all the features of couchbase instinctively seem very bad in that regard) it utilizes caching and indexing. And you as a user have no say in this caching whatsoever. You can't force it the flush the cache. You can't force it to reindex the views(because they're not executed when the request comes in, rather they're executed once and then it just fetches the result based on the parameters, I think). So even if you restart the webserver and the couchbase server, you still see very old data be returned. This can of course be good in a production environment where the data doesn't change often. But it's real tedious having to jump through hoops for every iteration during development.

Don't use couchbase.

Time for a short rant concerning my current problem with debugging Java code.

You see, I come from a background of almost exclusively C++ development and have recently been thrown into a rather large scale Java project. Since my previous experience of Java consists of two quite simple Android apps, I have never had to debug much Java code. 

As I understand the way Java is debugged, the debugger is just connected to the virtual environment the code is run in, pretty much whenever, wherever. This part I love, its really simple to get up and running. However then comes the next part: actually debugging the code in your project.

And the philosophy of Java (in my opinion at least) is that nothing, NOTHING, should ever be done twice. Whatever you wish to implement, you can find in some library or framework. And to keep the number of lines of code down you get all these smart things like annotations (and Apache Camel routes), which means that you never actually call your own functions. Everything is done through some framework, rendering the callstack in the debugger completely useless. So when you're thrown into a project where you have no idea what anything does, it's almost impossible to get a good understanding of the flow of the code. This of course means bugs. Unsolvable bugs...

Thats it for this first installment of my Rant Of The Day series.

See you (probably tomorrow).

Since I'm not around my close programmer friends anymore, I can no longer lash out my frustrations about programming any time I please. I've been doing this in an IRC channel for some time, and the geniuses there though I should post these rants on my blog instead, which I will now be doing.

Expect one every few days for the foreseeable future.

Although I haven't yet played Brothers or Payday: The Heist I would have to say it was a good deal for the other two games which I have had some great fun playing so far. And as I have quite a busy schedule the coming weeks with the move back home as well as a game in development I won't have time to play them, but someday I will. Someday I will...