Month: November 2006

Saturday was the big day in Japan for the PS3 launch, and thousands waited in the rain for their chance to get hold of the new PS3 console on day 1. Some stores instead of selling to ‘first come, first served’ handed out raffle tickets – even if you were amongst the first in line you still may not have got a new console if you didn’t get a winning ticket.

This Friday is the big day for the US, where limited preorders for the PS3 already sold within minutes, and demand is also expected to be high. Sony are expecting to ship 100,000 consoles a week to stores, so hopefully if you can’t get hold of one on day one then there will be more coming in the next few weeks.

It will be interesting to see how the battle of the next gen consoles plays out in the coming months – XBox360 have already got a year head start, but this doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone. The new Nintendu Wii is also going to launch a few days after the PS3, also at a respectable price of $199, which could really mix up the battle between the 360 and the PS3. Microsoft will also be adding the external HD-DVD player for the 360, but at an additional $199, this puts the 360 in the same price category as the high end PS3 if you are also looking to gain a next-gen hidef DVD player in your console.

Saturday is the big day for Japan as consumers will be able to buy the much awaited PS3 from Sony. Sony have also annouced that a 1.10 OS upgrade will also be available for download on the same day, which together with a 3.0 upgrade for the PSP which presumably adds support for connectivity between the PS3 and the PSP.

Potential consumers are being discouraged from lining up outside stores, since large public gatherings in Japan are seen as a public nuisanse.

Grails 0.3 has been released and it now includes support for Hibernate’s n:m mapping support (although in reality this is nearly always better if mapped as n:1 and 1:m with an association table in the middle – this was possible in previous versions of Grails anyway), plus additional simplification for developing your Entities.

Normally you would generate a new Entity using ‘grails generate-domain-class’ which would put in the necessary ‘equals()’, ‘hashcode()’ and ‘toString()’ methods, but these are no longer needed (unless you need to override them) as they are generated for you at runtime. This leads to very concise Entity classes.