Posted by billburke on August 29, 2007
I’ve been reading the RESTful Web Services book. I like it a lot. The only thing I don’t like is that there is too much Ruby in it. Ruby, please, go away. Might be a good scripting language, I don’t know, but to push Ruby or any typeless language for that matter as the way to do things, is just plainly irresponsible. Hey, I’ve been there. Done projects in Perl, Tcl, and Python. The 1st few weeks of the projects are highly productive. You are loving life. Then you find that you need to refactor. You need to search for usages of an object, oh, guess what, you’re screwed. Its funny to me to see that the people pushing these things are usually book writers, or get-in-get-out consultants.
Using a scripting language is like going to McDonalds. The food is quick and tastes great, but the time you spend on the toilet after just isn’t worth the whole experience. Yes, scripting gives you zero turn around development. But, if the industry is going to move to scripting, let’s rally around something type safe. How about Groovy? Sure, it has its typeless aspects, but it doesn’t stop you from doing pure type safe code. The mass of Java programmers out there can easily switch between it and Java. Or even better, improve Java (and Java EE for that matter) to make it closer to zero turn around. For example, adding the ability for schema changes in java.lang.instrument or even silly things like simplifying the package structure in Java EE.
Posted in flame bait, ruby | 16 Comments »
Posted by billburke on August 9, 2007
Its funny to see Novell re-hash a 10 month old press release that it is bundling Websphere Children’s Edition with Suse. My favorite quote from this newsclip is:
Users looking for more advanced features are steered towards paid WebSphere products, which offer more advanced features.
This is why we will never take Apache Geranium seriously. As long as IBM is the major contributor to the project, they’ll never be interested in elevating Geranimo to the feature set of JBoss. It will always be a hobbled platform. This is why you should always read the fine print in vendor friendly open source projects. If the project is dominated by a vendor which has a competing closed-source, expensive product, the project will never get anywhere.
Posted in business, flame bait, opensource | 4 Comments »
Posted by billburke on July 6, 2007
I got a few people pissed at me for being a little rough with Rod Johnson on a TSS thread on how Rod feels that EE 6 is “Getting it right”. Here’s what I wrote:
So, since Java EE 6 “Gets it Right” does this mean you’re going to bring Spring to a standards body so that its not controlled by one vendor? Until then, who cares what you think. This talking standards out of one side of your mouth and pushing proprietary software outside the other becomes tiresome. Put your money where your mouth is or STFU.
I later added:
Bringing pure IoC into EE 6 and getting somebody like Rod and Interface 21 behind it and supporting it would be a huge step in lengthening the viability of the EE platform. But I don’t think Rod and company believe it is in their best business interest to do so. I hope they prove me wrong. We did it with Hibernate and now with Seam and we found that really embracing standards instead of giving them lip service is a great business enabler.
Some were skeptical that Interface 21 could even work together with JBoss in EE 6. Aligning EE 6 with pure IoC is definately where JBoss wants to go for EE 6, so I don’t think there would be a problem working together. I actually think JBoss and Interface 21 would make pretty good partners in pushing EE 6 in the right direction.
So what was the underlying cause of my original emotional outburst? Rod and company have built a framework and business around tearing down various pieces of EE and replacing it with their own stuff. JBoss has taken a different approach and engaged the JCP process to improve the specifications rather than fight against them. Until Rod and company actually implement a JSR (even one!) or integrate into the JCP process, their opinions on EE 6 direction really mean nothing to me and is just a bunch of posturing. Many of us on EE 6 already know where EE 6 is “Getting it Right” because we’re the ones who pushed a lot of the bullet points in Rod’s “Getting it Right” blah blah blah.
Finally, its easy to smell like shit when you’re knee deep in it. Easier to criticize and tout how much you can do it better when you’re not involved. This is why I wish Rod would STFU, join the JCP, and actually try and fix some of the broken things. If after he’s tried, and it doesn’t work out, then fine, I’ll STFU then. I’m sure with the popularity of the Spring framework, Bill Shannon and company would welcome Rod with open arms. Such a move would have the support of JBoss and I’m sure other vendors.
Posted in business, flame bait, opensource, spring | 14 Comments »
