Nate's Programming Blog

Well James says I’ve been saying “Well” too much at the beginning of my posts, so I’m going to make a concious effort not to say “Well”.

Tuesday after my post about my phone interview I received a phone call from George (the guy at Daugherty that setup the phone interview) saying that I must of really impressed the client (Monsanto) because they wanted to do an in person interview the next day. Then at about 4:30pm I got another phone call asking if I can go over for an interview right then. So I went over to Mansanto (biotech company that makes Roundup) and had another really good interview. I could tell that I was really doing well just by the way they were acting. The next day, as soon as I got into the office David (The guy I interviewed with for the Daugherty position) and George told me that Monsanto wanted me to start as soon as I could. George said that he had never seen them move as quickly as they did, so I felt pretty proud of my performance in the interview. That day (Wednesday) I had to go take a drug test and fill out a lot of paperwork. They are actually doing a background check on me. I feel like I’m at the the post office again 🙂 There was talk today about possibly starting tomorrow, but at the end of the day George said it would probably be Monday since the paperwork wasn’t in yet. I’ll find out for sure in the morning.

I’m really excited about getting back to development with a purpose. I’ve been keeping myself busy the last couple of days by creating an abstract hibernate dao that takes advantage of generics from jdk 5.0. I’m really liking the new feature, it really takes abstraction to a whole new level. I was able to create the base dao and since it uses generics it is type safe. Basically I created a BaseDao interface with the 5 basic crud functions load, findall, add, update and delete. I use generics to set placeholders for the actually objects that get passed in and returned. I then created an abstract hibernate dao that implements base dao. It provides the actual hibernate specific implementation of those methods. Then I created 2 interfaces that extend base dao called user dao and address dao. These actually represent tables in my database. These interfaces also provide the actual types for the objects that are passed in and returned from the base dao. Then last I create a hibernate implementaton of the user dao and address dao that also extends abstract hibernate dao. These classes are for implementing any custom finders and such. It was absolutely gorgeous when I completed it. I hope I get to acutally use the classes and interfaces on an actual project soon. Another abstract class I created was a base dao test case. It has methods for load, add, update and delete and uses generics as well to specify the objects passed in and returned. Each method takes the actual dao implemented, a required object, a message and what the expected result is and processes the results. I think it will eliminate a lot of prep time when creating specific junit tests. The only problem I have is that it must extend some spring base test case so that the spring context files get loaded. Since it has to extend this custom spring base test case it isn’t possible to easily extract it out into a toolkit like I do the base dao interface and abstract hibernate dao. I can still reuse the class with just one minor change from project to project, I would just like to yank it and have it available in one central location.