Stillborn ideas: XDoclet2
It’s amazing that there’s still talk of xdoclet2, and that there are living breathing people who actually think it’s a reality. Yes folks, fresh from the team who fucked up xdoclet beyond all recognition, we have a new project that is, if at all possible, even more fucked up.
First, it’s been in development for over a year now. Let’s review what these precious little geniuses have come up with, shall we?
Oh look, it’s more waffle talk, as championed by the prevayler crowd of cluebies. How can one take seriously such claims as ‘XDoclet lets you apply Continuous Integration in component-oriented development’, or the mindboggling profundity of ‘Start writing your own plugin and experience how easy it is!’ given that it seems anything but.
There are a variety of websites, wikis, maven generated travesties, and various deposits of poo from the so called ‘development team’. One of the main bragging points is that the xdoclet portion of xdoclet2 is in fact 16kb. As usual, these dimwits went and invented a whole pile of worthless crap that nobody actually wants, because they were in desperate need of finding a new problem to solve, since the xdoclet problem had already been toyed with before. Browsing various sites shows us that these are some of the ‘frameworks’ used for, by, with, and around xdoclet 2 (this is by no means an exhaustive list!): qdox, NB MDR (??), androMDA, metaforce, Xbg (eventually renamed to the snazzier XGG, and recently obsoleted), betwixt, jelly, velocity, picocontainer, generama, and a mishmash of jakarta droppings.
Peeking at the source code shows more cause for rampant bellychuckles. A bunch of things seem to live under com.thoughtworks, there’s no documentation to speak of, and it uses that beloved codehaus tool for the permanently braindamaged, maven.
All this is made all the more glaringly offensive when one considers alternatives, like Cedric’s SGen. SGen has no dependencies, and it took me a few hours to manage to port about 60% of xdoclet’s ejb module. The difference says volumes about the day jobs of these people. One group are clearly consultants who are bored and try to snazz up their job as much as possible, the other is clearly by people who have jobs working on real products where they expect outsiders to critique their work and use it, ones who most likely have no time or patience to waste on halfbaked ideas.
The recommendation to use jelly as the template language is also particularly hilarious, given that James Strachan himself apologised today for the travesty that is jelly, in a brave move that I applaud heartily.
The biggest failing though is completely misunderstanding the users of xdoclet. Us xdoclet users don’t use it because of its architecture, it’s pluggability, or its ease of use. It’s rubbish at all three. We use it because of the plugins. That’s the ONLY selling point. As painful as it might be to admit, a large number of xdoclet users are also ejb users. Most of them are probably ashamed too admit it, so they aren’t loud or obnoxious about it. Having an xdoclet core developer pipe up on the mailing list telling people not to use ejb’s is insulting and rude. If anything, you should be scolding the asshats who use xdoclet to generate webwork action mappings and hardcoding xml files into their sources.
I respect and admire past work done by Ara Abrahamian and Aslak. Ara sadly seems to have moved on and is no longer involved with xdoclet. Aslak sadly seems to have taken leave of his senses once he joined Thoughworks. So, avoid xdoclet2 at all costs, you’ll live a longer, happier, and more fulfilling life.
Perhaps I’m overreacting, someone recently blogged that they were giving a talk about xdoclet2 at some conference and the room had all of one person in it interested, still, better safe than sorry!
March 26th, 2004 at 4:20 pm
You should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so.
March 26th, 2004 at 4:21 pm
I’ll bet you’re the type of guy that likes to hang out in public rest rooms and smell other people’s crap.
March 26th, 2004 at 4:31 pm
Nice bile. Bonus points for the wide range! You managed to, in a way or another, bile on XDoclet, XDoclet 2, Maven, Codehaus, Prevayler, Jelly, Jakarta, ThoughtWorks and EJBs, while no bonus points on the personal attacks front were earned (that’s 3 cheerings for Ara, James and Cedric, versus one attack on Aslak). The judge scores are 9.6, 9.2, 8.3 and 9.1. End result, 9.0. Please, don’t forget to pay for those hotdogs.
March 26th, 2004 at 4:39 pm
We leak in your chimney.
March 26th, 2004 at 4:40 pm
“Perhaps I’m overreacting”? C’mon, Hani, don’t the horse that has brought you this far. Overreacting is your signature style ;-)
March 26th, 2004 at 4:44 pm
Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey Iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years?
March 26th, 2004 at 4:56 pm
“wheel” was good, but it definitely has some problems. that’s why i’m starting on “wheel 2″! at first i was just playing around with wheel, trying out different diameters and widths, but then i realized: WHY A CIRCLE? that’s a pretty bad hardcoded geometric figure–and that’s when it hit me: i *had* to rewrite wheel… from scratch. this time i’m doing it right. the core module is really just a framework for dealing with “Geometry” plugins. that allows me to abstract out the whole of “wheel 1″ into a “circle” plugin, which is handled generically by the core system! best of all plugins are hot-deployable, so if you’re using a triangular wheel and suddenly realize you need a square one–no problem–just delete triangle from the deploy area and drop in square! and of course the whole thing is built on a jboss cluster, so it will be able to handle a geometry tens–nay, *hundreds* of times more complex than the simple circular wheels of today! oh, and also it just occured to me that the “geometry” will actually delegate calculations into an internal self-modifying BSF-compatible language, therefore any property of the geometry can change *immediately* at run-time! i’ll probably package groovy and beanshell to start with. and i’ve got to use “libNOS” (my commons-type library of Neat-O Stuff–it has a bunch of really cool utilities). i know some people will complain about wheel 2 having too many dependencies, but it’s a small price to pay for the kind of open architecture and limitless extensibility that i envision. it’s got a maven plugin, too.
March 26th, 2004 at 5:21 pm
What on earth? Compare the stuff earlier to the bile now. Hani, honestly has someone kicked you in the nether regions or what? Where’s the fire and brimstone entertainment value here? Sheesh. One slam on Maven, one slam on Aslak, that’s it ? Eh ?
March 26th, 2004 at 6:15 pm
Thou craven milk-livered codpiece!
March 26th, 2004 at 7:01 pm
I think thou never wast where grace was said.
March 27th, 2004 at 1:28 am
Isn’t Java1.5 metadata specs going to change all this? (/me is clueless)
March 27th, 2004 at 1:49 am
hani,
hats off to you mate… you have the balls to speak a truth and have the idiot savants scream back at you. for what it’s worth, you have a fan club.
XDicklet was a good idea gone arwry. The King is dead long live the king.
March 27th, 2004 at 2:31 am
Hani’s balls were sadly lost in a tragic accident about two months ago involving a JBOSS server.xml file and a new development methodology.
March 27th, 2004 at 3:51 am
Who dropped the ball on XDoclet2?
Duck: Aslak!
Who is out partying with a bunch of codehaus boyz rubbing their unmentionables together inside his private helicopter?
Duck: Aslak!
Who’s asshat of the day?
Duck: Aslak!!!!
BTW, Ara, if you are reading this bile, fine job, xdoclet should have probably just froze after you left. I don’t see why xdoclet needs to go number 2.
March 27th, 2004 at 5:07 am
Come on Hani! Aren’t you tired of biling xdoclet? Is xdoclet going to set a new world bile record? :) The world is full of bile-able things! Why don’t you bile Groovy for instance? That would be a bleeding edge bile!
In responce to Fred: thanks for the nice remarks. It’s good to see people using my ancient butt ugly code and still find it useful. And don’t blame Aslak or anyone else. Aslak is an awesome programmer and xdoclet owes him A LOT. We’ve all come a long way. I’m not using xdoclet anymore in my current project. That’s simply why I stoped using and developing it. But it’s an open source project and everyone’s invited, so please instead of biling and complaining start contributing to it. Refactor it, rewrite it, patch it, do whatever you think needs to be done. I’m not religous about it, if SGen is better contribute to it. In the end it’s just another tool….
Ara.
March 27th, 2004 at 6:31 am
Such inordinate and low desires,
Such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts,
Such barren pleasures, rude society,
As thou art match’d withal, and grafted to!
March 27th, 2004 at 8:53 am
Come on Hani! Aren’t you tired of biling xdoclet? Is xdoclet going to set a new world bile record? :) The world is full of bile-able things! Why don’t you bile Groovy for instance? That would be a bleeding edge bile!
In responce to Fred: thanks for the nice remarks. It’s good to see people using my ancient butt ugly code and still find it useful. And don’t blame Aslak or anyone else. Aslak is an awesome programmer and xdoclet owes him A LOT. We’ve all come a long way. I’m not using xdoclet anymore in my current project. That’s simply why I stoped using and developing it. But it’s an open source project and everyone’s invited, so please instead of biling and complaining start contributing to it. Refactor it, rewrite it, patch it, do whatever you think needs to be done. I’m not religous about it, if SGen is better contribute to it. In the end it’s just another tool….
Ara.
March 27th, 2004 at 9:19 am
It’s worth to mention that a project that was used as a guinea pig for Maven is now unable to find the goal java:compile when switching to 1.0RC2 while it works fine with RC1.
Well done guys !
March 27th, 2004 at 10:51 am
ara: groovy has been biled already.
Oh and: won’t the real boxed please stand up? please stand up? please stand up? etc
March 27th, 2004 at 11:58 am
You yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am if like a crab you could go backward.
March 27th, 2004 at 4:09 pm
“it took me a few hours to manage to port about 60% of xdoclet’s ejb module”
And a few days/weeks to find out that the real problem is in the remaining 40%?
March 27th, 2004 at 5:23 pm
ence, horrible villain, or I’ll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I’ll unhair thy head, Thou shalt be whipp’d with wire, and stew’d'in brine, smarting in lingering pickle.
March 27th, 2004 at 5:52 pm
Boxed, shut the fuck up.
March 27th, 2004 at 7:02 pm
There’s no room for faith, truth, nor honesty in this bosom of thine. It is all filled up with guts and midriff.
March 27th, 2004 at 10:16 pm
why, thou whoreson, impudent, embossed rascal, if there were anything in thy pocket but tavern-reckonings, memorandums of bawdy-houses, and one poor penny-worth of sugar-candy to make thee long-winded, if thy pocket were enriched with any other injuries but these, I am a villain: and yet you will stand to if; you will not pocket up wrong: art thou not ashamed?
March 28th, 2004 at 8:21 am
Your face is as a book, where men may read strange matters.
March 28th, 2004 at 9:11 am
It took me many hours to work out that the online documentation for XDoclet is totally wrong and the authors have no desire to fix the errors.
March 28th, 2004 at 2:08 pm
Good point Hani. As somebody was saying once “Ive been struck by how straightforward AspectWerkz is” (or whatever). I had the same feeling when I looked into SGen in comparison with XDoclet. Sgen is riding the “simple and lightweight” wave, Xdoclet was the best at his time. Things evolve though…
March 29th, 2004 at 2:50 am
JPMorgan (as of Q32001) controls $30,434b — yes that’s 30 Trillion worthless (?) dollars — of notional derivatives.
Is ol’ JP the beautician that is to give Sampson a ‘haircut’ :) ?
And oh yes: Even the *very idea* of xdoclets shows a complete, profound, (and sublimely delicious) lack of understanding of Component Oriented Software (not to mention EJBs.)
This has been a public service bile
March 29th, 2004 at 10:32 am
Your bum is the greatest thing about you; so that in the beastliest sense, you are Pompey the Great.
March 29th, 2004 at 11:00 am
Bile me when I start promoting XDoclet2 in the Java OSS mass media as “ready to use”. Until then, consider it work in progress and get involved if you want to improve it.
Still, it is far better than XDoclet1 in terms of speed, the number of files it can handle without OutOfMemoryError, extensibility and tag validation.
It just doesn’t have any docs yet. When/if it is released, you can consider it BILEABLE.
Admit it Hani. You love me. That’s while you biled me again.
March 29th, 2004 at 11:31 am
Hani bileing you is like him pulling your hair, teasing, etc… He’s just trying to get your attention. He wants you to love him, too, so he’s trying to show you he’s paying attention to you and wants your attention too.
March 29th, 2004 at 2:05 pm
Isn’t Sun coming out with a Meta language within Java itself. Is xdoclet even needed ? That goes for other open source crap thats out there. For most stuff SUN has created standards – why don’t u freaks start coding some open source implementations of these standards instead of coming out with ur own crap. Why is it u can accept Java and some of its standards but not all the standards that SUN’s puking out ?
March 29th, 2004 at 2:16 pm
Ha-ni loves as-lak, ha-ni loves as-lak!
March 29th, 2004 at 3:16 pm
Hence, horrible villain, or I’ll spurn thine eyes like balls before me; I’ll unhair thy head, Thou shalt be whipp’d with wire, and stew’d'in brine, smarting in lingering pickle.
March 29th, 2004 at 11:59 pm
The Last post!
March 30th, 2004 at 12:00 am
You may be an idiot, but that is the most brilliant critique of xDDoclets that I have ever seen.
March 30th, 2004 at 12:18 am
http://www.prisonplanet.com/032404firefightersdiscuss.html
March 30th, 2004 at 12:24 am
http://www.prisonplanet.com/032404firefightersdiscuss.html
March 30th, 2004 at 12:25 am
http://www.prisonplanet.com/032604nixontape.html
what a great country!
March 31st, 2004 at 3:37 pm
Okay, I was being funny. Aslak is just a funny name…perhaps it’s echolalia.
Actually, I don’t know the guy. I guess he’s a fair programmer…I wouldn’t say necessarily better or worse. Seems a bit spoiled though if you ask me. Just an observation. Contribution-wise…there are many people who contribute to be seen and not really contribute. I’m not saying anyone in particular is like that. Anyhow, Xdoclet is fine. I think many people are using it. I don’t know many who are into Jelly/QDox/new Xdoclet..I’m sure codehaus has some better contributions out there. For those, whoever worked on them…fine job. ie: I am a bit curious about prevayler/prevalayer (people can’t seem to spell it). Anyhow, it’s not like we need to ignore conributions either…I myself am working on something. I don’t need to invite a bunch of trendy nerds to help me. I’ll release it for improvement when it’s mostly done and not half-assed hoping the crowd will patch it. If anything, they often break it. Half ass starting doesn’t count as “awesome coding” to me.
March 31st, 2004 at 4:51 pm
So, if I’ve got this right, basically everything in the java world is hated. Maven sucks, ANT sucks,xDoclet2 sucks, JSPs suck, EJBs suck, TDD sucks, JUnit sucks, Eclipse sucks, JBOSS sucks, WebSphere sucks, Subversion sucks. And this was all gleaned from mainly just the blogs on the main page. I can only imagine everything I’ve missed. The question, then, is what are all the alternatives, and why aren’t they mentioned? All fine and dandy to say the world sucks, but point out what the unwashed masses _should_ be using so we can all fit in your model society. A rant for the sake of ranting is just entertainment value. Didn’t I just read a bile on signal to noise ratio in blogs?
March 31st, 2004 at 4:54 pm
So, if I’ve got this right, basically everything in the java world is hated. Maven sucks, ANT sucks,xDoclet2 sucks, JSPs suck, EJBs suck, TDD sucks, JUnit sucks, Eclipse sucks, JBOSS sucks, WebSphere sucks, Subversion sucks. And this was all gleaned from mainly just the blogs on the main page. I can only imagine everything I’ve missed. The question, then, is what are all the alternatives, and why aren’t they mentioned? All fine and dandy to say the world sucks, but point out what the unwashed masses _should_ be using so we can all fit in your model society. A rant for the sake of ranting is just entertainment value. Didn’t I just read a bile on signal to noise ratio in blogs?
September 22nd, 2005 at 11:13 am
I found that it is much easier to build your own code generator with XDoclet2 than XDoclet. See my blog on this : http://jackhung.homelinux.net:8080/jkc/space/XDoclet2