Or... is this a dog? WHAT IS THIS????

Change is good. Without change the world would still consist of... well - nothing. Amoebas? Supercharged neutrinos? Who knows. But change is good - no dispute about that.

With change comes adapting. And that can be hard. Especially depending on the change. Adapting takes time. However when you are in the eye of the hurricane things are not always clear - are they?

Change is good. Change requires adaptation. Adaptation is a process. Got it.

Most people start out with a blank slate. No expectations. No desires. Except perhaps for living - survival. Important as that may be, it is not what makes us unique. As we grow older we start having different desires, different things we strive for. It starts out with very basic things - perhaps that new bicycle for Christmas. The last cookie in the jar mom hid in the cupboard. But as we grow older these things attain a certain depth to them.

For some people they desire love. Other want that perfect job. Some want power, other recognition, some fame and some other just to be healthy. Problem is very few people attain their childhood dreams. Mostly because the childhood dreams are not realistic - they are either impossible or improbable.

I think people who are happy are those people who came close to attaining their childhood dreams. Unfortunately that accounts for a tiny fraction of the population - it just is not likely that you will achieve what you desire simply because your reference frame as a child is incomplete and does not consider the realities of the real world.

Have you ever wanted to implement Seam's rich:DataList but the search results could be in the tens or hundreds of thousand of records? Well, I did recently run into that exact issue. For the first attempt I tried to use the standard binding method, but knew it could never work in a production environment.

The problem is that in this mode, the DB is queried for all matching results. In my case that could be up to 200 000 records. So those 200 000 records would be returned from the DB (an arduous task), and then kept in memory - consuming all available resources. I have not measured it but my gut tells me a list like that would easily consume 500MB of RAM in Java. Coupled with the fact that sorting on table headers will sort that huge list in memory on the server, and it is clear that this is not even a solution for a single user system. I am to support about a thousand clients on one server. Ouch!

So I googled the topic and came across this website. I copied this guy's code for the PagingDataModel and related classes (hope I was allowed to do that - did not see any copyright notices in the source code!), and it almost worked.