The BileBlog

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.

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.