I hate you all
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.
June 18th, 2004 at 1:41 am
Poor old Kirk Pepperdine. What did he ever do wrong? I think he is one of the very few highly visible Java people who know what they are doing!
June 18th, 2004 at 2:12 am
Last post!
June 18th, 2004 at 2:41 am
I’d like to treat you to a nice hard shiatsu massage
June 18th, 2004 at 3:06 am
You are the PITA for the java community. Keep
it up. Truth must be told. This post is so damn
right.
June 18th, 2004 at 3:45 am
When are you going to move off jroller to a real blogging system? Hehehe… Mike Spille moved… Movable Type. Perl. It. Just. Works.
But you’re right. It’s pitiful that Java-powered sites can’t stay up. Is Java so crap or is it just the crap developers? Please tell me it’s the latter.
June 18th, 2004 at 4:07 am
This is perfect … although i am concerned. JRoller doesn’t stay up too well; could some kind soul on another host, please mirror this blog entry for Hani?
hee hee … the java industry needs to read this, assuming they get their heads out of their arse long enough to smell the fresh air!
June 18th, 2004 at 4:47 am
sean: hani already pointed out blog city, stay focused dude
June 18th, 2004 at 5:17 am
The real problem is that real java programmers are working, so they don’t have time to be in the ‘in-crowd’ of javaland. Good for them however :D
June 18th, 2004 at 5:18 am
It’s not so much the Java part that’s the problem but the open-souce-ecosystem mentality. Java only enhances it, so that it turnes into this n-headed monster.
MVC frameworks are easier to code, in Java, so everyone has one. Same for persistance utilities.
Java is too powerful of a language to be unleased on the unsuspecting open-source zealots.
June 18th, 2004 at 8:12 am
blog-city has had its own appalling spell of uptime. Ironically enough, it’s why I moved to jroller. It’s also why I won’t move again, very easily, because things obviously change …
Is downtime for a blogging site really that big a deal? Just open vi and write down your thoughts.
As for the entire royal flush idolatry issue, yes, it’s silly. Blogging, on the other hand, as value - if you want to post ideas and experiences regarding a language you elect to use each day.
biv
June 18th, 2004 at 8:19 am
err… appalling spells of downtime … you get the idea, at any rate.
biv
June 18th, 2004 at 9:03 am
Uptime sucks because people over complicate things. And then get entangled in the complexity they themselves created and don’t fully understand
Any mediocre developer could probably write what jroller provides in about a day with scriptlets , jdbc and oscache, Performance would be waaaaaaaaaaay better, you’d not have no uptime problems whatsoever, your lib dir would be nearly empty and the whole damn thing would just work.
June 18th, 2004 at 10:23 am
Somewhere i read.
“The one who s**ks his own unmentionable for a long time will eventually breaks his neck”.
Same happens here.
June 18th, 2004 at 11:07 am
Hani doesn’t love us any more :(
In an apt twist of irony, while we were writing the Javablogs update I would curse blog-city daily because I was trying to test the RSS updater against the live data, and at that time blog-city was pretty much guaranteed to time-out on 75% of requests. Eventually, they fixed whatever was causing blog-city to break, and it’s now a 100% Bile Approved[tm] paragon of uptime.
Anyway, Javablogs should be much better now. We tracked the problem down to Postgres refusing to use the indexes we’d so generously provided for it, because we weren’t using some weird bullshit Postgres-only casting syntax in queries.
It was still running fine right up to the point where the blog entry table got too large for a sequential scan to run entirely in the allocated memory. At that point the database’s disk I/O went through the roof, requests started backing up, and everything hit meltdown.
June 18th, 2004 at 11:55 am
The funny thing is that the problem with Roller was traced to OSCache, from OpenSymphony. Wait a minute, isn’t Hani on that Steering Committee?
June 18th, 2004 at 12:26 pm
i am wondering all the time: why is JROLLER’s downtime so ridiculously low?!?
Is it really OS Cache?! If so, then drop it, please!!! These downtimes are really inacceptable!
June 18th, 2004 at 1:27 pm
Puhleaze… plenty of projects use OSCache successfully… I’m sorry, but Roller has not been a paragon of correct technology usage the first 2 or 3 times they try them out. I think blaming OSCache is a copout.
On the other hand, I think Hani’s rant is offbase, too. There’s a big difference between BUILDING a web application and OPERATING a website under load. Operations is a very complicated field and needs dedicated staff for a large site. If you don’t have it, you get what you get.
June 18th, 2004 at 2:42 pm
I wonder if this counts as my first mention on the BileBlog…
June 18th, 2004 at 3:07 pm
One of the reasons why uptime sucks so bad for Java web projects is because to change a line is a CSS file inside a .war file, you have to redeploy the entire war! And, of course, no app server fully supports hot deployment over and over, because so many libraries are written such that they can’t be unloaded by the class loader. So, of course, every 15 redeploys, I have to restart Tomcat.
So WTF, Apache + PHP stays running even as I change every PHP script. Why is the mentality for Tomcat (and all other containers) OK for it to be restarted?!?!? That’s not how you run a 24/7 app. It’s meant to host many applications ALL THE TIME. I can’t take down our app server because I have to tweak a CSS file.
ARG!!!!
Java + Uptime is a joke, unless of course you don’t change anything. Make it so I can run Tomcat as long as my OS is running. Let me redeploy my apps into it over and over and over without worrying about OutOfMemory exceptions. Then we’ll talk.
June 18th, 2004 at 3:14 pm
Tomcat is tired. Use Jetty.
June 18th, 2004 at 3:42 pm
I can edit my JSPs in my project and have WebLogic pick them up automatically… Same with Resin or Tomcat if you’re running it from within IDEA.
You can also edit files in an exploded .war file and have a Servlet container pick up the changes. Servlet containers are required to support the exploded war format.
June 18th, 2004 at 6:49 pm
seth,
that’s bullshit. Orion has always done that. A bit hard to compare php to anything vaguely java too considering the fact that php is.. how shall I put this.. SHITE. Php is good for snappy and well-working hello world type applications, and slow , crashing “real” applications.
June 18th, 2004 at 8:05 pm
Seth, try clustering ;-)
June 18th, 2004 at 11:21 pm
Jason, you cannot imagine how surprised I was to hear the problem traced to OSCache. Someone else did that job, that’s just what I heard.
For the time being OSCache has been replaced with a custom little jobbie and there is still trouble. Work continues unabated to fix this.
June 18th, 2004 at 11:31 pm
Hani,
Wow. You are putting a hell of a lot of effort into this multi-post tirade. Who cares if Rick Ross enjoys sniffing his balls more than fixing his site. I mean the amount of bitching you’ve made about this makes me think that you actually ……. *care*.
I think a tear is coming to my eye.
And speaking of Rick Ross, I can’t help but thinking of Bob Ross, the painter who would render horrible landscapes not worthy of wiping my ass on. But he did paint cute little fluffy clouds. And who can forget that afro….
June 19th, 2004 at 7:46 am
I can tell you from bitter experience that OSCache is a steaming pile of shit. Don’t even go near it.
June 19th, 2004 at 10:04 am
Poor Java Souls in here. All I read is Java + Web, JSP shit, and another one complaining about Tomcat dying at 15 redeploys geez man in the first place you got Tomcat in production environment? Cmon! be serious. Can you do something meaningful to your java other than web? Or is that all you can do? Can you spare OSCACHE in your blame game, I happen to use that thing successfully aside from web applications. Java is a serious language and most that I see posting here are less serious homosexuals who only know how to prettify their pages.
Hani is right about those “in-crowd”. I don’t even hear them talk about Java “close-to-the-metal” fearing someone might caught them blabbering.
June 20th, 2004 at 6:06 pm
>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.
I must be behind the times. I thought Java was for powering intelligent, network-enabled toasters.
June 20th, 2004 at 8:13 pm
Brian, was that the reason of doing FindBugs? Anyway it seems that it is good deal for Roller and FindBugs. FindBugs can pickup endless number of antipatterns from Roller. ;-)
June 20th, 2004 at 9:24 pm
Hey man, I’m sure this guy here is a great programmer and knows his stuff but you gotta check out http://www.blogger.com
Being backed by Google with mucho processor farms kinda helps.
June 21st, 2004 at 5:57 am
Yeah, hani is right on the javaland folks. Most of them seem to be unemployed, thus having a lot of time to appear on every blog and every spot in the java community. I know a lot of really good programmers, most of them are not very visible to the internet community and much of them are in fact not java programmers at all. So, dont believe these kids, promoting a new webframework every week and adding the 8th persistence proposal on top of it.
Regarding JRoller, i said it all. I am running MT on my own Server and i had 1 hour downtime in about 1/2 year. JRoller achieves that easily within one day. And i dont do anything regarding uptime consistency, i am just running this crappy linux server which is homed in the IT Center of the biggest german provider. Things can be easy. But now they will tell me how much traffic there is and how hard it is to keep that up.
June 21st, 2004 at 4:21 pm
I think that Hani himself knows that many of his assertions are exaggerations. But he keeps on with them. Why?
June 21st, 2004 at 6:28 pm
Because he’s a pilot. Pilots are prone to exaggerations, just like fishermen.
Today I read some pilot claiming to take his glider plane 62 miles into space. Just ridiculous.
June 22nd, 2004 at 9:11 am
“I hate you all…”; Starting to sound like a hurt child there.
April 13th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
Dead on! And not just in the Java community do you see this.
June 2nd, 2005 at 7:08 pm
“Yet the reality is that though the reasons have changed, there is much to mock and deride within the java community.”
If you happen to be the sad, lonely, vindictive, grumpy type with nothing better to do in their life than hate a programming language, then yes I suppose there is. You’re so pathetic, you really are.
August 4th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
still open