The codehaus of crack
The codehaus organisation has been quietly growing, with new projects joining and being created all the time. Some of these are rather interesting, and merit more than a dismissive scoff hurled their way. Alas, many others barely deserve said scoff.
My issue isn’t with their projects (let’s face it, most are pretty dim, but what can you expect?), my issue is with their feeds. During a particularly boring meeting (made much more tolerable with the ability to surf during said meeting), I stumbled onto the horror that is feeds.codehaus.org.
All it took was a quick glance to feel the bile rising within, that all too familiar rage bubbling up and threatening to explode in inappropriate ways. It was quite unfortunate that I was in a meeting, really. I tried to control myself, but some poor sap burbling on about disconnected brokers and message evolution ended up feeling the brunt of the hausbilge pouring out of me. I beat a hasty retreat and so now here I am.
So, what is so wrong about the feeds? Here are some quotes: ‘Maven the achievement of the civilization’, ‘Maven has become de facto standard in this field’ (for repositories of java artifacts), ‘I’m finding navigating devlopment sites that don’t use Maven irritating’, ‘It’s actually been a while now since I’ve run across a Java project that’s not using Maven’.
These are clearly the ramblings of people who have partaken a bit too liberally of the crack pipe. I’m having trouble articulating the breathtaking arrogance, ignorance, and sheer audacity of these comments. How anyone in their sane mind can view maven in such a positive light is truly a testament to the human mind and its ability to dismiss all external stimuli in an effort to justify its own insanity.
I mean, even the standard maven bigots will concede that it has some fairly serious issues. They’ll all admit that for all its faults, overall it’s been beneficial to them. One thing most are united in is the disdain for the generic website that maven shits out. It’s not just bad, it’s offensive and insulting. Whoever came up with it (not just the layout, the idea too) should be neutered. The mere sight of a maven generated site makes me want to grab two white hot pokers and shove one up my ass and one into my eye and see if I can get them to meet inside of me just to ease the pain.
Alright, I need a moment to calm down.
The rest of the blogs are equally stupid, if not as offensive. Duplicate announcements, hare-brained schemes for more offshoots and maven sub-projects, snow falling, free razors, and so on. Maybe the agenda is ‘feeds of anyone related to the haus no matter how tedious, boring, or irrelevant’, either way, it makes for very drab reading. I mean, people even talk up JUnit in Action, which might be one of the most annoying JUnit book I’ve seen. I actually flicked through it trying to look up something I was trying to do (setup code per set of tests). Instead it kept talking about mockobjects, cactus, and other such filth. In fact, if you follow all the advice in the book, you’re guaranteed to be doing nothing but maintaining your ungainly test cases. I suppose that’s one way of ensuring job security, sneaky and underhanded as it might be.
Don’t even get me started on how half the projects on there violate their own manifesto (although I AM pleased by the liberal usage of ‘Bob the Despot’ throughout the manifesto). Still, they’re well on their way to being another jakartafest, which I suppose they’re foolish enough to take as a compliment.
December 16th, 2003 at 9:56 am
I bet you’re secretly a maven fan.
You should try to tell us how you REALLY feel about Maven.
December 16th, 2003 at 10:01 am
Which obviously leads to this picture in my mind:
December 16th, 2003 at 10:11 am
How can you bile against a site that hosts a project called “drools”? Of course drools have changed the default l/f of maven in a weak attempt to avoid biling.
And an aside – WTF is up with the useless jroller search field. Can anyone get it to find anything?
December 16th, 2003 at 10:25 am
So what is wrong with codehaus (apart from a little new-project-trigger-happiness)?
P.S. I think that you are actually continually reading the mind of the guy I sit next to at work and posting his inner-most thoughts. It is beginning to scare me a little.
December 16th, 2003 at 11:21 am
“The rest of the blogs are equally stupid, if not as offensive. Duplicate announcements, hare-brained schemes for more offshoots and maven sub-projects, snow falling, free razors, and so on.”
Duplicate announcements? From several blogs? Heaven forbid two blogs carry the same news – I mean, that never normally happens, right? These are developer blogs, they chart the ongoing progress of development. Where exactly is your point?
“Don’t even get me started on how half the projects on there violate their own manifest”
Hypocrisy is the bugbear of a Tiny mind, Hani. I seem to recall you moaning about Jakarta download links when OpenSymphony provided none for some of its products, so clearly you believe hypocrisy is not a major issue :-)
December 16th, 2003 at 1:10 pm
We’d better not ask what he’s going to do with the other eye…
December 16th, 2003 at 1:27 pm
I’ve actually used ant and maven quite a bit. I’ve been looking for a comparison of the two without too much bias. Hani seems to bile Maven but doesn’t provide much insight. Here are some of my thoughts on the two.
* Why is Maven a separate project? Why isn’t maven just a set of custom tasks for ant?
* Why do people think that Ant doesn’t scale? I’ve built projects over 700KLOC with Ant without any complication. Trying to do something comparable with Maven would be hysterical from what I’ve seen.
Let’s look at the history of Maven for a second. It originated in the Jakarta world (AFAIK). Jakarta projects are very similar in their build, jar, and deploy to website process. Some developer threw a hissy when he saw that the build files contained duplication between projects. Also, said developer also appeared to have a problem with multiple copies of the same jar on his machine (b/c we all know how valuable disk space is these days). Maven solves these problems but at the cost of simplicity and flexibility. I truly believe the maven project should simply be a set of custom tasks for Ant and a couple build templates. End of story.
The idea of a remote repository for versioned jars is convenient, but has nothing to do with Maven the build tool. Actually, the fact that Maven creates a central repository on your machine for jars actually becomes a huge pain in the ass b/c this makes it difficult to package projects for deployment with dependencies included. Also, in any build you have dependencies that exist at least on two levels (build and run). Maven makes no attempt to make this distinction.
Have you ever gone to download a Maven powered project? Maven projects are impossible to deal with because the build tool inexplicityly becomes your deployment and distribution tool. Not a good idea. A person downloading your project shouldn’t give two shits about your build tool. They just want to click on a single link and have everything they need to run and integrate your project into theirs.
I officially give everyone permission to check jars into their SCM. Maven has promoted this idea that jars have to be kept in “repositories”. Well.. every project I’ve every worked already has a repository that comes with version control and a whole host of features that make an http file server look a little childish. I thought everyone knew this but as a general rule – CHECK EVERYTHING INTO VERSION CONTROL (Yes everything).You will thank me later.
Maven is breaking the cardinal rule of development tools – DO ONE THING WELL. It manages to be a half -assed attempt at a lot of things: build tool, CMS, jar repository, dependency manager, deployment tool, release manager, etc.
At this point, Maven appears to be in a death spiral resulting from feature creep. It’s death is imminent, and will be ugly.
December 16th, 2003 at 2:13 pm
Hani – you work on the Open Symphony projects? Talk about a fucked up group of shitty, disorganized projects! No wonder you’re so pissed.
December 16th, 2003 at 2:13 pm
That’s a great comment on Maven!
December 16th, 2003 at 2:41 pm
Yah, we’re discussing feeds.codehaus.org as a way to turn into a jakartafest. We aim to write a proposal within the next few months, and then vote upon it, probably followed by a few months of inaction. Would that suffice?
December 16th, 2003 at 5:14 pm
WOOHOOO, best bile in a very long time!
December 16th, 2003 at 5:53 pm
At least the hausmates can drink _and_ code.
December 16th, 2003 at 7:11 pm
honestly there is no or very limited information about the projects in CodeHaus. all are going to crappy maven produced places. i am not an expert in java, and definitely i need more information, code samples, documentation and probaly comunity forums for understanding what actually projects about . i dont know, i feel like they say “hey, we are elite, if you dont understand get out..”.
December 17th, 2003 at 4:27 am
The only two projects from CodeHaus I’ve look at in any detail are Drools and Groovy, both of which have ample documentation. Which ones were you looking at ahmetaa?
December 17th, 2003 at 7:21 am
for examle classworlds.
December 17th, 2003 at 12:49 pm
Its always extreme statements by people like those quoted about Maven that cause other people to take the extreme opposite stance. Perhaps if Hani sat back and looked at Ant, and Maven and thought things through rationally he might say something like “I can do what I want with Ant, and Maven at the moment gives me the ability to do these 3 other things which isnt enough for me to start using it. Maybe I’ll change in the future but there isn’t enough for me at the moment”.
December 17th, 2003 at 3:03 pm
OFF TOPIC!!!!
Biling has made it to e-bay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2448756945
December 17th, 2003 at 3:56 pm
Rampant Clown…your post really makes me want to punch my clown.
December 17th, 2003 at 4:03 pm
That’s got to be Hani over there on eBay
December 17th, 2003 at 5:41 pm
Sure sounds like it. What a man. Both a motorcyclist and a pilot. Quite the talent.
December 17th, 2003 at 5:46 pm
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2442354423
December 18th, 2003 at 1:33 am
Punch whatever you want Puncher, i’m rampant
December 29th, 2003 at 6:55 am
quote from codehaus website:
“Codehaus aims to support commercially useful projects, and thus does not sponsor or assist with projects licensed under the GPL or other business-hostile licenses.”
Further comments unnecessary. Twats.
January 6th, 2004 at 10:32 am
last weekend i downloaded codehaus JAXEN (an XPath implementation) and it works like charm. It’s definitely useful software.
January 9th, 2004 at 7:24 pm
What excessive incoherent bilge…
I agree completely with ahmetaa – the lack of information on these projects is appalling. And will certainly hamper the growth of these projects .
When talking of elitism and arrogance it helps to consider that a process of project darwinism is fortuantely very likley to weed out the intellectually more immature projects supported by a cadre of highly conceited and opinionated bigots. Even Linux has grown up. Any project that wants to survive long term needs customers. Support them.
I heard from a respected colleague that Drools and Werkflow were promising products. I just spent the last hour or two checking out the documentation (not the Javadocs) I mean real docs that show you how to use it. The PDF have loads of blank pages especially in the critical “how to” sections (the examples). There was however tons of absolute arcane esoteric nonsense about rule engine theory.
I’m currently investigating Cocoon and I think that I’d prefer to hack things with a system that is at least well documented system, than having to dredge through the excrutiatingly dull of extracting some logic from Drools / Werkflew.