The BileBlog

Given my abysmal track record with regards to session attendance, I thought that today I’d make an effort to go to more than one. The first of these was the ‘how to make Swing look native and great’ session. So so much of this session resonated with me, and I ended up feeling very angry and bitter at all the developers out there who have such a callous disregard for such basic elements of UI design.

I mean really, it takes SO LITTLE to put yourself in the mind of your end user, and imagine what they feel when confronted with your UI. What are they trying to achieve? Are you helping or hindering? Are you wasting your time on hidden features that the UI does not advertise? Are you writing your UI to your code, or to your user’s needs? These mistakes are frightfully common. Just look at roller (granted, it’s a web UI, but the same principles apply). The whole thing seems to deliberately go out of its way to spite its users and deliver a painful and inconsiderate UI. The same thing applies to site after site after app after app.

One of the key take home lessons from the session too that all the assholes who demand 100% native looking/behaving apps with no effort on their part are ignorant asshats. Swing will do 80% of the work for you. The rest is up to you. Yes, amazingly, you DO need to know the UI guidelines of your target platform. Yes, you DO need to test using multiple platforms. If you don’t, you end up with shit like Eclipse, which, through the divine gift of obstinate fuckwittedness, behaves like a Windows application no matter what platform you run it on. If your UI is successful and usable, the best outcome is no feedback from your end users. They’ll be suffused with a happyhappy feeling and won’t quite know why. They’ll eagerly use your application and not cringe when they’re asked to do something with it.

On the downside, when you have a bad UI, very very few users will be able to pinpoint what is so bad about it. Instead, they’ll hate your application and feel an incoherent rage towards anyone insisting they use it. It’s not like web shit where there are a few million html monkeys and two ways of doing everything; with rich clients, there are thousands of ways of doing everything, and about 3 people who know the right way. Finding the sweet spot is a task far more daunting than farting out yet another silly web intranet app.

Conclusion? The user drives the UI and features, NOT the underlying code. It’s your responsibility as a developer to ensure that the mapping between your UI and your underlying functionality works well, and to acknowledge that such a mapping is necessary. Also, always always go that extra mile to ensure that your app is well behaved on all platforms, and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort doing that with no feedback. No feedback that is beyond smiley gleeful users who are more often than not totally unable to attribute that sensual sense of satisfaction with anything you might have done.

The next session I attended today was the AOP panel with Cedric Beust, James Gosling, Graham Hamilton, and Gregor Kiezales.

The absolute best thing about this panel is the lack of any of the JBoss fuckfaces. Of course, that omission is perfectly sensible given than JBoss does not do AOP, it does AO instead. Gavin Fleury turned surprising shades of purple a couple of nights ago trying to explain to me the huge differences between AO and AOP, and how you really shouldn’t be mixing the two concepts (apple and orange type situation). Perhaps next year we can have an AO panel alongside an AOP panel, so the JBossites get to have their say about their wonderful weird inventions.

The other thing that struck me in this panel is how, well, sane they all were. It’s truly a pleasure listening to a bunch of pragmatic intellectuals who have clearly thought long and hard about all the issues surrounding the topic. The difference between this and the AOP panel at TSSS was huge, and a great contributor I suspect was the delightful lack of the pettiness and self-aggrandising of the likes of Fleury. It really puts things in perspective, seeing professionals discuss such a topic vs a bunch of amateurs who are far more interested in name dropping, furious arm waving, and maniacal religious proclamations. It’s sad that the latter is a lot more populist and accessible to the unwashed masses though (yes, and I’m perfectly aware of the irony of me saying that, of all people).

Did I learn anything new? Not particularly. I felt more comfort with the thought of people like these guys thinking about AOP than almost any other group. There was a certain responsibility and pragmatism that was surprising to see. Graham for example clearly stated that Sun is conservative when it comes to changing Java, and I fully applaud that attitude. The overall message is that AOP has its uses, and is a perfectly valid new way of thinking about development. Is it superior, or does it radically alter WHAT we do (as opposed to HOW we do it)? I don’t think so. Hard problems are likely to remain hard, and a recurring theme in the discussion was the amount of binding and knowledge that aspects have of their targets. At the end of the day, I and many others felt uncomfortable with the level of coupling required, and that once you step aside from trivial examples, you’ll find that your aspects need to know an awful lot about what they’re aspecting, and collaborate fairly closely with the targets. That somewhat diminishes the overall benefit of AOP in many cases, and in some cases, proves that it is outright unsuitable.

Oh and bad news for all of you who think that AOP will make your life easier. You still need to be a skilled and competent designer to nail down what aspects you need, how to write them, when to apply them, and when not to. Bummer!

I thought it might be mildly entertaining to try and spew out a J1 report while being somewhat intoxicated. So fret not if the quality is not quite up to the standards that one might expect, I have an interesting alcohol content within, to put it mildly.

The evening started off well enough, with a pleasant outing with the universal mother, Cameron Purdy. He dropped me off at the tangosol party (the poor bastard had to go attend a BOF), and went his merry way. I had a few drinks, met a number of random people whose names I’d be hard pressed to care about, let alone remember, and got a number of incoherent phonecalls from crazybob.

At this point, I decide that it’s useless attempting to actually decipher what bob is saying, and head home to an early night. I assume that tomorrow will involve more ludicrous antics and that I could get a jump start on the whole ordeal by sneaking in a decent night’s sleep.

Not so! As I’m happily snuggling into bed, comforted by all the idiots out there drinking themselves into various states of vegetation, none other than crazybob calls yet again. This time, he refuses point blank to get off the phone unless I agree to show up at the borland party.

What does one do in such a situation? Well, one usually agrees, then promptly goes to sleep. I however was filled with brotherly love and concern for my fellow partner-in-crime. I could not in good conscience let this depraved psychopath inflict his own brand of evil onto a largely unsuspecting and innocent world. I get changed and head out to chaperone our hero and newfound fearless leader (sorry Rick Ross).

The borland party is loud. There’s a live band and a truly impressive number of pathetic losers twitching out of sync to live music. There’s also some freaky game going on whereby random fuckwit A throws one of those glowy band things to random fuckwith B, who in turn tosses it back to random fuckwit A. Astoundly, the parties involved never seem to get bored of this game, and the view is endlessly punctuated by flying glowy bands.

Best of all, I met some random guy who professes to be a regular commenter here, yet for security reasons refuses to disclose anything about himself. We have a great conversation, where I periodically try to figure out if he’s clown puncher, biggus dickus, or any of the regular geniuses who make this blog worth reading. Sadly, he holds steadfast under persistent questioning, and I leave with nary a clue to this stranger’s true identity. All I know is that a random commenter has an awfully attractive wife, and is not nearly as insane or deranged as he probably sounds here.

From then on, the night deteriorates surprisingly rapidly. Crazybob is convinced that if we do not go to some random club, the world as we know it might well end. We finally arrive at a compromise whereby I agree to go to this club if we manage to recruit a third participant at the tangosol party. So we head on there, and I am plied with a plethora of freaky drinks by crazy Irish and Australian people. Patrick Linskey of Solarmetric manages to somehow convince me that JDO and their impl of it is the best thing since Gavin Fleury’s potty training. The fact that he managed to do that should have been sufficient warning that I am completely and utterly fucked up, but I failed to see the warning signs, sadly.

Much to my dismay, the tangosol party yielded not just one, but about 7 guys all willing to go to some random nightclub. We all bundle into cabs and hurtle along to crazybob’s chosen place, where a variety of us spasm uncontrollably while some music plays louder than Marc Fleury’s anti-Geronimo chants. Matt Raible takes incriminating pictures of practically everyone, and I’m open to blackmail suggestions that’d encourage him to burn or destroy this evidence of exactly how retarded a bunch of java guys can look on a dance floor.

Unsurprising, this does not slake crazybob’s insatiable thirst for mayhem and destruction. Somehow, against all odds, he manages to pick up some rumours of a place that might be open. More bundling into cabs follows, and I end up being stuck with Matt Raible, David Blevins, and a random tangosol guy (sorry random tangosol guy, I’m too tired to remember your name). By some quirk of fate, the cab driver is Lebanese, so him and I periodically converse in Arabic, with Matt interjecting with astoundingly rude suggestions and translations. Our destination is thankfully closed for the night, and we end with a distinct whimper instead of the traditional bang, with each of us sedately delivered to our hotels.

Of course, it’s now 4am and I’m not going to get enough sleep, yet again. My rage against these bastards is boundless, at this moment. I hate you all, and I am disgusted at myself for selling out so thoroughly and indulging in your filthy little circlejerk, you chozgobbling asshats. Is there anything more pitiful or disgraceful than blogging about a random outing with a bunch of tossers? I might as well download maven now and use it to build groovy (during the 19 minutes of build time, maybe I should start up jboss and force myself to read every line of output) so I can write some scripts to call jakarta digester, then debug it by using commons-logging and finally deploy it on websphere, to teach myself a lesson.

The second day started far earlier than it should have. I’m so sick of conferences where I’m surrounded by a bunch of bastards who refuse to go sleep at a sensible hour, and instead offer up ludicrous ideas for things to do at 4am.

The festivities this time included a condom and 14 guys packed into Cameron Purdy’s room. James Strachan might look innocent, but there’s something of a dirty animal lurking within. That animal however can’t hold a candle up to Richard Monsoon Heffel (har har), who pretty much IS an animal.

Earlier in the day, the infamous Russell Beattie made an appearance at the blogger meetup. Thankfully I didn’t quite have enough to drink to go up to him and possibly go to some length to elaborate on my opinions of him, his phones, and his jobs. I was however reassured by a number of other people (who want to remain nameless, the cowards), that his name is pronounced Bee-A-tee. This of course resulted in those same mean people making endless Russell/Beatch jokes. Such insensitivity!

While I won’t sully my blog with a link, I will do Simon Phipps a favour and mention that Jonathan Schwartz now has a blog. Simon was practically soiling his pants in excitement, and trying to get everyone to mention this fact everywhere, so here you go Simon.

As for the daytime, I was bitterly dissapointed by the fact that the one session I chose to go to (JDesktop Network Components) was awfully good, so I really don’t have much to say. Amy Fowler really is as attractive as all the pictures make her look, so that made it even harder to dislike the JDNC session.

The evening festivities are about to commence. I might try to see if I can crash the JBoss party, preferably with some Geronimo people. There’s still hope for a big punch up between Marc Fleury and any number of innocent people out to destroy JBoss and rule the world with their own open sores wank.

Beyond that, I’ll be at the tangosol party, no doubt well into some obscene hour of the night with highly dubious company. I really must try to do something java related tomorrow, beyond baiting Gavin Fleury, James Strachan, and Robin Roos (who really seems to have an unhealthy obsession with JDO).

Having rolled in at 11am today (keynotes are for girls, real men just loiter around doing nothing intead), the dominant emotion of the day is…tiredness. I woke up at 2am local time, so it’s pretty much bedtime right now. Undaunted by this timezone trickery though, I thought it’d be worth making some half-assed effort to actually attend the damn thing.

The pavilion area was surprisingly boring. Maybe I showed up late or something, but the swag on offer was truly pathetic. The best you could hope for was a pen, keychain, or tshirt. Not only that, but every fucking vendor you look at will start chasing you with a zapper in order to get you into their ‘opt-in’ list and bombard you endlessly with shite about their tawdry little products.

In fact, I was so exceptionally bored by the vendors whoring their wares, that I simply couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to actually attend any of the technical sessions. The boredom was of such magnitude that my brain had simply shut down and refused point blank to do anything I asked it to.

It turns out that you don’t actually need to do anything or go anywhere during these things. You can do so vicariously simply by accosting various people and demanding to know what they’ve seen and heard. So following my own advice, the following facts emerged:

Is anyone else utterly sick of seeing all these tossers swooning and soiling their panties at the mere mention of gmail? All credit to google for conducting a stupendously clever marketing campaign, where people feel it’s some sort of achievement just to have one of these email addresses.

It’s not even like the damn thing is that incredible. Have our standards sunk so low that we now sprout (or don) 11inchers just at a web interface that has unobtrusive ads?

Perhaps it’s just me, but I simply don’t get it. For one thing, there’s no way to make gmail talk to anything else. No hooking up into any existing servers, no import export, no sync with anything, it’s an island unto itself. This is all great for those of us who have so far resisted succumbing to the modern day evil of email, but for those of us with existing accounts, gmail is a nice gimmick, nothing more. It’s a pathetic, laughable, and mostly pointless offering for anyone currently using IMAP.

Setting aside that rather important omission, the bloody thing also has no folders. Now I know that a bunch of you have brainwashed yourselves into thinking that you can do whatever you want with labels and filters, but come on, isn’t that just your way of pretending you have folders? What’s so evil about folders anyway?

Then we have all the asshats losing bowel control over the stellar UI. Yes, stellar that is if you happen to use IE or a mozilla whelp. Anything else is shit out of luck. Sure, it’s plain and functional, and the keyboard shortcuts are handy once you learn them, but so what? What’s the fuss about?

Worst of all is all the pillowbiters who try to get others to compete in performing some demeaning circus trick in order to ‘win’ a gmail invite. Disgusting. In fact, just to spite you asshats who worked hard to ‘win’ an account, I hereby offer up one gmail account to a more or less random commenter to this entry. You don’t have to do anything to win. Being rude, offensive, witty, and generally disruptive to the happyhappylalajavaland collective might improve your chances, but really, I’ll give it out on whimsy for what will no doubt be a fairly ridiculous reason.

Now, regarding Russell ‘fatshit’ Ashcroft, I’ve decided that the vote was close enough that he doesn’t quite earn a full bile interview. Given that he’s deleted up to 20 comments from his entry whining about me and blocked several IP’s, I suspect any further humiliation hurled his way will result in a flood of tears and a rampant round of that ‘phoneplay’ he’s so fond of. Those poor Nokia models. I bet they never quite realised they’d be used in that disgusting way; boldy going where no small rectangular object has gone before.

Besides, the fat little fuck has enough trouble holding a job, and is reviled aplenty by everyone he’s ever worked with, if his resume is at all factual. Here’s a tip bushboy, the next time you’re offered a resume writing class, don’t elect instead to cram your filthy face with wafer thin mints, and go to the fucking thing, for god’s sake. At this rate, the only person Russell ‘IHATEYOUYOUCONDESCENDINGFUCKWHOLOVESBUSH’ Ashcroft will be able to have a conversation with will be Marc ‘IWILLMAKEWEDESTROYYOU’ Fleury.

See you kids at JavaOne.

While we’re waiting for the final verdict on poor Russell’s crucifixion, I though I’d give some advice for the JavaOne attendees this year…

Yesterday after struggling briefly with dom4j and trying to convince it not to go fetch external DTD’s (thanks haus bob for showing me the fugly hack required), I became sad and despondent. What is our crime, such that we must be punished with such crappy XML API’s?

The only two contenders to try and address this that I’m aware of are dom4j and jdom. Ideologically, dom4j wins because James Strachan is more competent than Jason Hunter. Practically speaking though, jdom has a much more civilised and natural API.

Unfortunately, jdom seems to be growing uncontrollably, with every release an order of magnitude fatter than the previous one. It also looks like its developers have entirely lost interest in the whole thing (shades of xdoclet), and are now off into lalaland to play with shinier toys. We’re promised a 1.0 version in Q1 2004, which has long since come and gone.

So why can’t there be a decent XML API? Why must a selective list of children nodes consistently violate the principle of least surprise, when it comes to what happens when you insert in it? Why should both of those API’s constantly surprise you with their behaviour, until of course you’ve been brainwashed into it seeming ‘natural’?

So are there any nice java-friendly lightweight wrappers for XML manipulation, or is that a particular problem that’s considered too boring for today’s fast-paced dedicated professional fappers?

So I note that poor old Russell has thoroughly soiled his panties over being called tedious, boring, and utterly pointless. Now, I can’t decide what to do, so I’ll leave it up to you unwashed masses to determine his fate. Should I post an Beattie interview, so he gets a chance to reveal his true self to us, or should I take the high road, and ignore him? Some pros and cons:

Pros

For anyone who spends any time being part of the ‘in-crowd’ of javaland, it’s very hard not to come to the conclusion that the whole lot of them are mostly a bunch of smug, self aggrandizing, pompous gits.

Sure, this is no surprise to most people. It’s also very easy to forget. By now, we’re all used to the pompous ‘revelation’ that every little shit has on his or her (well, his) blog or article. It’s become par for the course for people to constantly genuflect in the direction of practically anything, gawping with endless delight and amazement at every sight and sound.

The amazing part about all this is that java folks will then be amazed when they’re mocked and held with such low regard by virtually the entirely of the IT industry. Whine all you want about how you poor java people are judged by nothing more than applets, that people still think of you lot as nothing more than silly web people. Yet the reality is that though the reasons have changed, there is much to mock and deride within the java community.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s look at a couple of examples. I’ll set aside the proliferation of web frameworks, the endless obsession with persistence, the inexplicable utility library fetish, and maven. Those are simply too easy of a target.

Remember the great javablogs rewrite? It was rewritten using spring, hibernate, webwork2, and all the bells and whistles of the day (all under the hood, naturally, nothing of any practical use to users) in the name of elegance, simplicity, maintainability, testability, and all round greatness. Yet, as users, what do we have? Well, looks like we have the same old site, with the exact same nightly hour or two of downtime.

Next up, my new favourite whipping boy, roller. Same thing. Endless tweaks and features that I have yet to see a single person care about, yet is one of the few sites that can give atlassian a run for their money in terms of downtime. Amazing, considering that the roller people are running out of industry ‘experts’ to fix their incompetence. First poor old Gavin Fleury had to teach them how to use hibernate, followed by a host of minor celebrities. It’s almost like a weekly show with these guys. ‘This week, we’re proud to beg Kirk Pepperdine for help. Kirk is the maintainer of javaperformancetuning.com, and we hope to have a good week or two with him before our next mystery guest’.

End result? Truly pathetic uptimes. In fact, the uptime is inversely proportional to the amount of bragging that goes on. You have sites like javalobby (yes, while I despise them, the site itself stays up) and theserverside where there’s very little ‘we just rewrote everything using this shiny object we found on the street!’ noise, yet the damn things stay up day after day after day. blog-city is another fine example; there’s next to no talk of how wonderfully java it is, yet…it….just….works.

So is it so surprising that people will laugh at java developers? Looking in from the outside, wouldn’t you laugh and dismiss these people, people who can be entertained for months by nothing more than a dangling shiny object, people whose highest accolades go to he who is able to tug at his unmentionables more frantically than his neighbour.

Of course, this is probably not unique to javaland. it’s the curse of any community: to be judged by the loudest in it, where the loudest are, almost without exception, the most fuckwitted dullards ever to grace that hapless community.

Oh and I’ll be at JavaOne.

It’s nice to see that some things never change. The astounding incompetence of some of the JSR expert groups has become a comforting fact in this ever-changing landscape.

Today’s life-affirming group of inspirational thought leaders comes to us by way of JSR-170, the content management JSR.

The one obvious thing about this JSR is that all the vendors have come together and managed to somehow compile a list of the worst things from each of their products. The loving touch of Vignette is there to be derided and laughed at, while IBM’s bludgeoning idiocy works hard to highlight its presence.

Where does one start? Well, let’s focus on the API, since there’s plenty of ammo there. We have a delightful ‘util’ package. This package contains one class: ISO8601. As everyone knows, it’s vital for a content management system to have a quick and easy way to deal with ISO8601 compliant date forms. The need is so great, in fact, that it’s worth shipping a class to do this in the specification, rather than allow vendors or users to write those tedious 3 lines to do it in.

Of course, the true sign of an expert group desperate to make its mark is the rampant disregard for any built-in classes and exceptions in Java. So for example, we have the delightful ‘javax.jcr.UnsupportedRepositoryOperationException’ and the even cuter ‘javax.jcr.InvalidSerializedDataException’. Having said that, why settle for duplicating existing exceptions, when you duplicate whole API’s too? Witness the infinite hours of fun that can be had with javax.jcr.access.Permission!

To you aspiring EG members, if you think you’ve gone the whole way now, you’re sadly mistaken. The final salt-in-the-gaping-wound to be delivered to your poor unsuspecting audience is badly named classes. This way you can ensure you’ve fucked them in every possible way. This JSR provides this killing blow by way of ‘javax.jcr.nodetype.PropertyDef’.

Now that the group has discharged its ‘every JSR must ignore real world java usage and the core API’ duties, they can start to have fun. To distinguish themselves from other JSR’s that cause your average JSR eye bleedage, these guys really pulled out all the stops. They hit us with javax.jcr.StringIterator, javax.jcr.query.QueryResultIterator, and javax.jcr.query.QueryLanguage.

All in all, an impressive JSR. Roundly beats many many others in terms of unusability. Its downfall however is that it doesn’t quite manage to beat the servlet spec in the ‘mix implementation and spec’ category, where it has reigned supreme ever since its inception. A valiant attempt though.

So, taking our fearless leader’s advice. I thought I’d provide polite helpful ideas on how to improve the JRoller homepage. I posted these on Dave Johnson’s blog. I still find the homepage to be a complete eyesore and have stopped reading it altogether. I gave Dave 5 or 6 pointers that I thought would make it a lot more usable. I did so in a polite, considerate, and helpful manner, after first congratulating him on fixing the performance issues.

It turns out that there’s no interest at all in this kind of feedback. My comment was deleted, and my emails inquiring why that deletion happened went unanswered. Now, it’s his blog, he can delete any comment he wants. However, it’d be nice to be notified that anything I post there will be automatically deleted, and maybe even given a reason (yes, even ‘I hate you’ is a good enough reason). To just delete constructive criticism seems pathetic and petty, and goes a long way to explaining why jroller is the steaming pile of dogshit it seems to be, and outdoes itself in that area with every new release.

If in fact, Dave did not delete my comment and it’s some cosmic freak accident that deleted it, along with my email to him, then I apologise and take it all back, and will keep on thinking that you’re one of the good guys.

Rick Ross seems to have his panties in a bunch over how ungrateful a bunch of JRoller users are over the abysmal ‘facelist’ it received a few days ago. These users not only had the gall to complain (sometimes loudly) about what an astounding step backwards the UI was, but some even went so far as to complain about all the new bugs that were added that did not previously exist.

Not only did he privately think they’re idiots (as well as post a comment here), he felt the issue was of such vital importance, and that these culprits were so worthy of his damnation that he mentioned it in his comical editorial at javalobby.

What is astounding is the argument that he uses to shut us rude complainers up. No, it’s not anything sane like ‘please don’t use abusive language when complaining’, or ‘please work with us to resolve these issues instead of yelling at us’, oh no. It’s ‘be GRATEFUL’.

Since when does open source shit smell better than standard toilet shit? Are we back in 2000 when linux was about to take over the desktop by sheer dint of being opensourcy (setting aside slashdot’s assurances that THIS is the year for the linux desktop)? Did I just blink for a really long time, and somehow manufactured the last couple of years in my own mind? Did I imagine that whole ‘the open source label does not confer instant success’ rude awakening that hit all those commies, hippies, and deviants?

Our Fearless leader you might be, Ricky, visionary or ‘thought-leader’ you are not. Sure, Dave Johnson spends much time on JRoller. He, unlike you, realised that if one ignored the vitriol, that these ungrateful complainers actually had constructive criticism to offer. He, unlike you, did not cry like a little girl and assume that mere effort is sufficient for undying gratitude.

In fact, I personally couldn’t possibly care less about the open source nature of JRoller. I did once look at the code and had to be hospitalised for severe eye hemorrhaging. I won’t be doing that again in a hurry. So for me, the choice of JRoller involves two very simple factors. The first of which that it is somewhat java related (if one works hard to ignore all the political jizzgobblers that seem to think that armchair politics is somehow pertinent or worthy of sharing), and that it’s free.

Note the severe lack of open source factors. JRoller could go closed source tomorrow and it’d matter not a whit to me, provided the two factors above still hold.

So Ricky, get agitated for us being rude, knot your panties at our indignation, but do not, do not, demand we bow down before your tattered open source flag.