AlphaWorks is a scam
I’m constantly surprised by how easy it is for IBM to get good karma with the community by consistently, persistently, and gleefully pumping out a steady stream of crapulence.
Take a look at alphaworks, for example. Supposedly a repository of cool emerging technologies that do something innovative.
What do they have? A truly impressive collection of useless crap, united by silly licensing and restrictive usage. To be fair, a lot of the junk they have on offer does vaguely smell of ‘cool pointless research’, so in that way at least they are remaining true to their mission.
We have such wonderful examples as the ‘Reflexive User Interface Builder’, basically yet another pathetic attempt at an XUL like xml descriptor for user interfaces. Why do these people delight in flogging the bloody carcass of this particular horse? How many times must this idea fail to catch on before people realise that writing interface in verbose non-visual XML is astoundingly unintuitive and irritating?
Exactly how many suspicious half-baked api’s does one need to tack onto websphere/DB2/mainframes anyway? It’s not like anyone could actually use this beyond installing it, gawping (mostly in confusion) for a few seconds, then uninstalling it since there’s no way to actually ship it or use it in production without either a) figuring out some back channel to do so, b) Forking over precious dollars.
The problem isn’t even limited to Alphaworks. IBM is almost impressive in the amount of crud it churns out. I am literally lost for words when some of you halfwits suggest that Java be handed over to them. Just look at any JSR they’ve been involved with. Awkward names abound, coupled with a disturbing case of 1998 coding practices makes for vomit inducing JSR’s.
Of course, the reason isn’t as mysterious as it might seem. IBM’s interest in java is predominantly due to Websphere. That delightful tool that IBM KNOWS is nothing more than a very big wankstain on the no longer so virginal application server market. IBM might be full of dimwits and dullards, but they certainly know that to sell websphere, they must avoid all technical people and ensure they only sell to sales/upper management/marketoids, because they’re the group that’s too detached from the crapulence to know any better.
So before you pillowbiters start cooing about how great IBM is, remember that their ultimate goal is to force everyone to use the absolute worst application server there is. They know it, we know it, and their whole business model is based on the fact that those who control the purse strings are the only ones who don’t know it.
August 18th, 2004 at 9:54 am
HA!
August 18th, 2004 at 10:14 am
I usually go from “Oh Cool!” to “Oh crap” when I see the anouncement about something new on AlphaWorks then check out the license.
August 18th, 2004 at 10:47 am
well eclipse is halfwhat decent
August 18th, 2004 at 10:53 am
log4j came out of alphaworks.
August 18th, 2004 at 11:00 am
So a company with hundreds of billions market cap produced a logging framework in one of its intern “research” groups. Impressive…
August 18th, 2004 at 12:31 pm
You should see this Websphere Integration Edition with the BPEL. It’s about the most convuluted development experience in the world.
August 18th, 2004 at 1:30 pm
The convoluted development experience of which you speak is known as “the death of a million angle brackets.”
August 18th, 2004 at 1:38 pm
Can I ask what environment you typically develop in so that I may use only the best components?
August 18th, 2004 at 1:46 pm
If anyone wants IBM to take over stewardship of Java, just look at java.util.Calendar. This horrific turd of a class came from IBM.
August 18th, 2004 at 1:54 pm
Yeah, but my RoboCode bot will own you!
August 18th, 2004 at 2:01 pm
“The convoluted development experience of which you speak is known as “the death of a million angle brackets.”"
No, this is worse. You draw out these BPEL process workflows and code in the blanks along with XML angle bracket WSDL & schema. Then this damn thing generates EJBs/Java/etc packages it into an EAR file and deploys it. It takes forever just to compile and run your code each time. And the error messages you get are all just about that EAR file that was generated. As far as tracing it back to whatever you did in the BPEL you’re basically in device driver land, eyeball it.
August 18th, 2004 at 2:04 pm
NO, for the Calendar you should thank somebody else. It’s just a reflection of the imperfection of the world.
August 18th, 2004 at 2:17 pm
I just looked at the source code of java.util.Calendar and forgotten horrors resurfaced. Who in their right mind would give the month of January a value of 0 and December 11? This alone should have the authors imprisoned in Abu Ghraib. Some will say, incorrectly of course, that “in Java we use 0 as first index”. Sure, but months are numbered 1-12 in the real world. On top of that, to show their inconsistency, weeks are numbered 1-7, so there!
While we on the subject of consistency, try calling getInstance. Most of the time you’ll get a GregorianCalendar, except if you’re in Thailand, then you get a BuddhistCalendar. This of course is not documented.
Thanks IBM, for this heavyweight replacement to java.util.Date.
Come to think of it, that’s probably Sun’s fault. Will Java ever have a prober date handling package? (And don’t bother mentioning Joda, I’m aware of it, but it’s not standard and not even in version 1 yet, mkay?)
August 18th, 2004 at 2:19 pm
eh, java’s a load of crap. we deliberately keep it obscure, slow, and dependent on APIs and acronyms. that way all of you pompous blow-hards won’t notice you are basically COBOL programmers in 10 years, and none of you will know anything close to assembly, so we can keep our technical dominance.
have fun suckers!
-IBM
August 18th, 2004 at 2:33 pm
I agree completely. But now I’m IBMs bitch workin in Websphere and WSAD all day long … it’s not that bad - so far.
August 18th, 2004 at 3:18 pm
Jesus,
Love your old desk, BTW. I wanna hear how you love wsad in a couple months. We found another gotcha with websphere, they override commons logging. If you happen to fix it on your local machine, it doesn’t fix it in a clustered environment.
Ah, good times.
August 18th, 2004 at 5:43 pm
Jesus works for me now. He’s in the upper reaches of Hell. I reserve the lower circles for Apache Jakarta committers, JBoss employees, etc.
August 18th, 2004 at 9:34 pm
At least we know the IP address of Jesus and Satan now!
August 19th, 2004 at 12:10 am
The worst application server there is? Something tells me Hani’s never had the pleasure that is Sun One Application Server.
August 19th, 2004 at 5:12 am
The worst application server? Ha-ha. Try SAP WebAS! Lots of pleasure guaranteed.
August 19th, 2004 at 12:31 pm
I can consider myself happy, I had never heard of AlphaWorks before this Bile (tks, Hani). Now that I have heard of it, I’ll know when to run away.
The most laughable in my opinion is the “Installation Verification Utility”. No, wait, what’s that? “IBM Daily Compression Generator”!! The crap/code ratio is twenty times worse than our long lived and come-in-no-matter-what-you-do repository, Sourceforge.
August 19th, 2004 at 2:24 pm
i hid a garlic bulb somewhere in my spot.
u will smell the sweet stench of jesus in a few months…
and p.s don’t think mr. ferret’s sittin on his chair no more …
August 19th, 2004 at 4:15 pm
What’s harder to do? To mass produce bile software or to bile the companies and persons that write it?
Dr. Java
Tips for Tricks!
August 19th, 2004 at 4:30 pm
IBM is **great**! These are the people who brought us SWT and DB2, and oh… let’s not forget those *wonderful* implementations of the JVM! ;-)
August 19th, 2004 at 8:14 pm
java is definitely a load of crap, i agree there.
August 20th, 2004 at 2:13 am
I’ve had some success with JInsight off alphaworks.
But the rest did look like a load of horseshite.
August 20th, 2004 at 9:26 am
Hmm … wasn’t “worst application server” awarded to JBoss already, or are both JBoss and Websphere tied for this spot? :)
August 20th, 2004 at 3:51 pm
Nope, JBoss was “Best Java Installation Tool” and “Best XML Tool”
August 21st, 2004 at 6:55 am
IBM contributed javax.swing.text page too, I am told.
August 21st, 2004 at 12:09 pm
I saw someone on a list blaming the Date thing on IBM/Taligent.
August 22nd, 2004 at 3:31 pm
Well it looks like you have a clusterfuck of a problem here and are looking for solutions. Sounds like nerd business to me. Step aside.
August 23rd, 2004 at 1:29 pm
alphaworks had stuff on AOP before it even became a hit in Java, so they must be doing something right.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH
August 23rd, 2004 at 11:31 pm
Why does everyone insist on beating off to AOP. Write the application the right way and you don’t need to use AOP. Just because you think it’s the cool thing to do doesn’t mean it needs to be done.
August 25th, 2004 at 11:30 pm
LOL…I found that article incredibly funny and sadly, true. I’m a consultant in the red-headed stepchild group within IBM: ESMT–Enterprise Service for Microsoft Technologies. Yup, we build .NET applications for IBM clients (who refuse to bow down to websphere like good little peons). Ah, the stories I could tell about the .NET/WebSphere battles that I’ve witnessed and the useless crap the salesholes try to throw at the clients…
September 2nd, 2004 at 5:42 pm
Why does IBM want us to use Kiva/Netscape/iPlanet/Sun ONE application server?
September 30th, 2004 at 7:00 am
Well I guess it has just inherited IBM’s culture. Look what I found out in their documentation today
Note: WebSphere Commerce uses WebSphere Command Caching internally such as with MemberGroupsCacheCmdImpl in the cache filter above; however, WebSphere Commerce does not officially support WebSphere Command Caching of WebSphere Commerce commands.
Can someone answer these simple questions
1. what is supported and will function
2. If this is what they have to offer why they are charging the kind of money they do
\a
September 30th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
Well, Eclipse is da bomb.