Ales Novak's old blog

Last week I saw internals two of our products - DSAME 5.1 (pretty old), Creator 2EA (pretty new). Look at some DSAME exception handling code:

        try {
            connection = openConnection(); // possible SQL error here
            statement = createStatement(); // and here
        } finally {
            statement.close();
            connection.close();
        }

Comments are mine. We looked for a database problem but all we saw was some kind of WRITE_ERROR, it turned out to be caused by a NullPointerException which was masked again by swallowing the exception and printing out only message (which is none for NullPointerException). Bad bad. The NullPointerException was of course caused by some SQL exception and by ill-constructed finally statement.

On the other hand see following:

        try {
            ...
        } catch (Exception e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }

This is much better, original exception is preserved - message and stack trace.

Sun acquired Forte for some $400 M some 5 - 6 years ago. Products are gone or in sustaining mode, people left, were fired. Sales were never good. Why? One guess because the software was not based on Java thus making it difficult for sales force to say our story is Java, but we offer Forte for integration. Not having dedicated sales force did not help either. By the way, our hardawre sales were sky high so nobody really cared.

Cobalt did not work in my opinion because Sun sales were not (and are not) interested in selling $400 pieces. Given that they have millions as their target, you can see why. Partners maybe could deliver on that but then again, I see our partner model as a bit broken at least here - but when I ask other people from neighbouring countries, they say the same.

Then we go for StorageTek, unlike Cobalt, this is expensive stuff. Thus chance that it will be accepted by our sales force as relevant for their quotas are high. In this regard, we could sell e.g. aeroplanes, except that we are a bit more experienced in data center :-)

Finally SeeBeyond - I believe that Waveset aquisition was/is successful. Product itself is great, based on Java so no problem here. I really like it. Price is built to be interesting for sales force, customers need it. I wish we buy more companies like Waveset. It seems that SeeBeyond is similar in this regard - Java, price, quality, customer needs.

Radim and Kamila were borned on Tuesday 5th July.

    public int getMaxSleepTime(Date time) {
        Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
        cal.set(2005, 6, 5, 15, 45); // month is 0 based
        
        Date date = cal.getTime();
        int hours = date.before(time) ? 2  : 10;
        return hours;
    }