The BileBlog

While engaged in yet another futile attempt to find something useful on codehaus, I came across drools. While I wouldn’t be caught dead even trying out any of the stuff of dubious quality that bob the despot spasms out, I thought I could at least look at the ‘outside’ and see if I had, after all, misjudged that merry band of spastics.

So, armed with nothing but a browser, a pair of eyes, and an average grasp of the English language, I thought I’d read the documentation and see if it presented a compelling case for trying out drools.

It goes without saying, of course, that I had a good few chuckles and more than a few angry shakes of the fist at the audacity of these people. It’s downright insulting seeing how little attention is paid to documentation. Nevermind the quantity of it, the abysmal quality of what little there is is breathtaking.

Let’s examine the so called drools ‘manual’ to start off with, shall we? The preface has a ‘why rules’ section, which includes the single sentence ‘rules are important…’. Fair enough, it IS a work in progress after all. Sure, it’s easy to knock up some javadocs, but as to why rules are important? Well, clearly the author of a RULES LIBRARY wouldn’t be expected to know such things off the bat. While nobody makes an effort to convince us that the whole concept behind this project is a worthwhile one, we do get a nice paragraph telling us that this tasteless arrangement of words was produced without the aid of Microsoft Office! It was written using Linux! It was spellchecked on OSX! Various open source packages were fondled! Great, because if we weren’t told all that in the fucking manual, some of us might actually refuse to read it. I make a point in fact of never reading any manuals without knowing full well what time of day it was written, using what software, and how many bathroom breaks were taken during key chapters (and for once, I won’t suggest what dubious activities took place during said bathroom breaks).

Later on in the manual (and in the 2 sentence summary of the project!) we have some fappery regarding the algorithm the whole thing is based on. It goes without saying of course that the details (or in fact, high level overview even) of this algorithm is nowhere to be seen, unless by some amazing feat of perseverance, you’re able to last to the index of the manual. We’re expected to automatically ooh and aah because it all sounds awfully clever. You can almost feel the author climaxing over their clever arrangement of words. Gosh, it almost sounds scientificy!

Getting down to the details of the implementation, we’re blessed with yet another verbose xml syntax. Particularly novel is the definition of durations. A duration is specified by a duration element, with attributes of: hours, minutes, seconds, days, weeks. While many people complain of the verbosity of xml, I have to give points for this particular syntax for managing to easily beat every other challenger for the coveted most-verbose-way-to-specify-a-time-interval award.

No codehaus project is complete without the appropriate injection of the cool language of the month. You can almost judge the month where a particular tool was written by the ‘plugins’ it supports. In this case we have python mentioned in the manual, with groovy fappery tacked on recently. Who would have guessed!

Needless to say, this silly little project has next to no users. However, it serves its purpose admirably. Yet more proof that the haus is more of a seemingly scientific study of the masturbatory habits of java developers ages 20-35 than anything to be taken seriously.

Bob might make a for a good despot, he even might be witty and charming. His downfall however seems to be that he can’t code his way out of a wet brown paper bag.

Oh, I’m also going to TSS Symposium, and I’ll be very annoyed if any of you asshats decide to resort to physical violence to get me back for the months of emotional abuse I’ve hurled your way.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2004 at 2:12 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.