The BileBlog

Here we go, Marc Fleury is about to wow us with his genius. We’re finally going to find out what those ten million dollars buy.

Well, it doesn’t look like they got much value for money, to be honest. It seems to have bought them a few ludicrous constumes and some bad face makeup. Marc’s Joker smile looks more like a Vegas hooker’s lipstick on a Sunday morning than Jack Nicholson’s thespian perfection. Marc indulged in a few foolish leaps. On stage though (sans costume, but still clothed, thankfully) is Bill Burke, merrily giggling to himself (no doubt interjecting the peels of laughter with the regular spate of uhms and errs that seem to accompany him whenever he sees a stage).

Our friend starts off with some feeble joke directly at yours truly (sadly, he pretty much mumbles it out so I have no ideas if it was actually funny). This was followed by an enema reference from the Batman movie, likely a branching out from a homoerotic obsession with the caped crusader and his sidekick Bill^H^H^HRobin.

The JBoss propaganda machine is in full force. Marc is clearly derisive of the crazy AOP people, or the academic aspect people. Nono, JBoss does it differently, it uses…AO! Yes folks, the P has been unceremoniously ditched. They probably found out that they only own 66% of AOP so dropping the P seems like a good investment, as it allows them to own 100% of AO!

Next up we have a nice little blurb about how great EJB3 is. As expected, he has a competition with himself to see how many times he can say JBoss and EJB in the same sentence.

The obligatory ‘arm waving’ joke is tossed out (sorry Marc, Gregor did it with infinitely more panache and style), and for some bizarre reason, our new fearless leader chooses to insult Sun by being very dismissive and vague towards the JBI spec.

Next up we have possibly the worst diagram I’ve seen in the last two days. Trust me, I’ve seen a LOT of bad diagrams the last couple of days. This one has a dazzling array of circles, with various blocks, cylinders, and lines tossed in for visual effect.

More tired analogies of better moustraps, the usual adulation directed at Microsoft, Marc is still a good speaker, he just says such ludicrous things with amazing disregard to content and reality.

In turns out that the new version of JBoss, the one that’ll take everyone to the stratosphere of application development, is going to be an orgy of aspects (sorry, AO) that makes all current aspectfests seem like a bunch of servlet weenies.

It turns out that to do this, the JBoss group now, in its entirely, all now THINK IN AOP! Presumabely a few pressed of Marc’s control device and the appropriate instructions were beamed into the brains of such hapless victims as one Gavin Fleury.

It is now time to reveal a dirty secret. AO is, apparently, not new at all to the JBoss camp. JBoss 3.0 and JBoss 2.0 both included AO! That’s right, JBoss is not jumping on the AO bandwagon for cheap PR – they’re driving it and have been at the wheel for years, behind the scenes, scheming away in some private cvs tree (yay open source!) that has to this day remained hidden. Mike Spille is familiar with this tree, I’m sure.

What aspects have they been using? Simple you fool – the logging aspect! Yes – the feature that sets JBoss apart from those silly fools from BEA and those suited morons at IBM is the 90 pages of logging that JBoss spews out when starting, some call it logging, but to them, it’s a logging aspect.

OH HORROR OF HORRORS! There’s a huge error on one slide! True to JBoss style, sloppiness rules the day, and this slide has, emblazoned on the top, almost taunting poor Bill Burke (who is still looking uncomfortable) with those three letters, A O P. That P! How dare it! Out damn P out!

Setting aside the usual slipshod crap they’re throwing up, we are also presented with some ideas of highly dubious merit. For example, the whole concept of a web request in its entirety being in a transaction. Gosh, I’ve always wanted to roll back my transaction after returning a result page telling them everything worked. If JBoss has learnt anything, it’s the importance of a false sense of security to give to everyone they deal with. Credit though for not only applying that approach to their marketing, presentations, talks, and posts, but to the very code itself!

The slides really are the gift that keeps on giving. They’re degenerated to such an extent that the current one actually says ‘FAST TIME TO MARKET’. There also seems to be a bit of an obsession with things of 3. We have titles like ‘etc etc etc’, ‘simplification simplification simplification’, ‘simple simple simple’.

There’s also a continuing battle of wills between Marc and Bill to determine which one actually wears the pants in this presentation. Bill gets up, sits down, Marc accosts him to explain something, Bill gets up, shuffles about, demands Marc explain something. Perhaps a few rounds of practice might have paid off.

At this point, something seems to have gone horribly wrong as Marc resorts to making…..fart noises. Yes folks, the man who just managed to scam a VC out of ten million dollars is up on stage, with cheap lipstick, making fart noises. There is something sick yet fascinating about this.

Finally, we’re regaled with JBoss’ stunning success, with pictures of bigger and bigger circles denoting increasingly amazing things. The next logical step would simply be for them to delcare JBoss an independent country.

We’re finally at the end, and nobody has any questions. Marc clearly wanted to say something about open sourcing java but I think he badly miscalculated when most people responded that they do NOT think that Java should be open sourced. His feeble recovery effort was nothing more than a whimper, “I know what that means. OK, I don’t know what that means.”.

That’s that folks, an entertaining keynote, albeit not deliberately so. At least, not in the manner it came across. I’d also like to think the 5 other mean horrible people who contributed insults through the wonderful magic of Rendezvous (a group bile, if you will). Most importantly, I’d like to thank the genius nearby who realised I ran out of battery power and rapidly whipped out a spare and handed it to me. Now THIS is a Java community!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2004 at 9:50 pm and is filed under General. 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.