Month: August 2008

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The power of greylisting is aided by whitelisting

I’ve been running gld for more than two months now and it is truly efficient. The current statistics say:

# of entries in the database         : 16077
# of one hit entries in the database : 15100
Oldest entry in database             : 65 days ago

This means that almost 94% of the attempts to send mail through my server are only made once!

Unfortunately Facebook and Google Mail do not play well with greylisting, as attempts that are told Service temporarily unavailable, please try later by greylisting are very likely to be retried from a different IP. I’ve made a little script that scans /var/log/mail.log for such mail servers and add them to the gld whitelist table.

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Entity bean bloat

I’m currently getting acquainted with JBoss, SpringSource Application Platform, JBoss Seam and Spring Framework.

One thing that amazes me is the amount of code required for some simple O/R mapping, or I am missing something? I hope to be wrong about this, but it seems like an EJB3 "entity bean" requires, for each column in a database, the following items written and maintained:

  • a private member variable
  • a getter method
  • a setter method

As I have some Ruby on Rails experience, where inheriting from ActiveRecord gives you those things out-of-the-box, I am amazed of the sheer amount of boilerplate code needed in Java for the same thing! I asked a friend wih ZendFramework knowledge about how it worked there, and it seems like Zend_Db_Table_Abstract works just like ActiveRecord.

I can’t be the first one perplexed by this, especially not when the development guide for the ASM 3.0 Java bytecode engineering library contains exactly the above parts as an example of generating bytecode! (See section 3.1.3.)