The BileBlog

TIBCO naming convention joys

As promised, here’s another rant pointing out how tibco is in fact firmly stuck in 1997. This time I’ll address their ludicrous, nay, obscene, naming conventions and general approach to javadocs within their Java SDK.

First, the javadoc issue. I realise tibco is very much an ‘old school’ type company. They believe in doing things the old fashioned way. The reasons for this are forgotten in the mists of time, all that remains is an obsession with an approach to java made popular in the early days. Namely, providing javadocs in winhelp format.

I cannot possibly stress how painful this is. Picture a large, sharp object with many pointy bits. Picture said object being wrapped in sandpaper. Got it? Now, picture said sandpaper-wrapped object being inserted repeatedly, persistently, and violently into orifices that god intended to only expel stuff. At this point you’ll begin to be able to imagine how painful it is to use javadocs provided in this horrific format.

I’m sure that as I write this, tibco lovers everywhere are dying to point out that html docs DO exist. Yes, they do, except that of course, they’re not even vaguely sensible to navigate. They’re just exports of the winhelp format to html. Not exactly useful.

Now, assuming that you make it this far. You decide to actually use said javadocs to write some adapters. The first slap in the face is that every single class, exception, and interface starts with the letter M. I don’t even know what to say to this. All one can do is shake one’s head sadly and weep hot tears of bitterness at the cruelty of the world. Why M? Member? Masturbatory? Master? Malfunctioning? Mostlyharmless? What on earth could it stand for? More importantly, if it’s a universal property of every single class and interface, why does it merit mentioning?

Next, in order to create a tibco adapter, you need to subclass one of their classes. Setting aside the issues with inheritance, base class evolution, and all that nonsense (all easy to handle sensibly, despite Jason Carriera’s doom and gloom warnings), then class is called….MApp.

MApp?!? What’s so bad about oh I dunno…AbstractAdapter? BaseAdapter? ApplicationAdapter? MApp tells us absolutely nothing. Now if this were an isolated incident, they could be forgiven. Someone made a stupid name suggestion in 1996, and now they’re stuck with it because they don’t like screwing their existing users with every new release (are you paying attention, OSS people?). Sadly though, this genius didn’t just name that one class. We also have such gems as MData and MInstance.

It’s truly surprising the difficulties that many people seem to have with naming things. Java has a very clear guide on how to name things, and what the prevailing conventions are. Sure, it requires a miniscule amount of creativity and thought. One would think that that tiny amount is a prerequisite to being able to write said classes in the first place. Sadly, there is far too much evidence to the contrary.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2003 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.