The BileBlog

I’ve had this idea percolating for a while. I was reminded more strongly of it as I just left a comment on Dave Johnson’s blog on his latest ‘bile vs jsf heros’ entry (which he will no doubt delete shortly). Dave managed to post TWICE about this, with thinly veiled insults hurled in my general direction. He points out that Rick Hightower has successfully defended JSF, while ignoring that Rick, pleasant chap though he is, is hardly an unbiased third party. His livelihood depends on JSF, so nobody is going to die of shock when they find out that he is quite the JSF biblethumper.

Anyway, enough digression. Back to good vs evil. In javaland, there are two fairly distinct camps. How can you tell which is which? Easy, just look at the tools and products they use.

The side of evil’s web framework of choice is Struts (moving onto JSF now that everyone else laughs and points at their struts apps). The side of evil will always run their webapps on Tomcat. The side of evil’s idea of J2EE is JBoss. The side of good on the other hand will use pretty much anything but Struts. The side of good will run their apps on Resin or Orion.

In terms of editors, the side of evil prefers Eclipse. The side of evil is almost exclusively pure Windows users, and wouldn’t know a cross platform issue if it yanked off their genitalia and slapped them in the face with it. The side of good uses IDEA, because they’re not afraid of paying for quality software.

This extends into build tools as well. The side of evil will persistently keep trying to shoehorn maven into their projects and pretend they’re enjoying it. The side of good would rather gnaw off their own unmentionables than touch maven, and merrily keep getting things done faster, better, and lighter with ant (without paying Bruce Tate any denomination of any currency).

The side of evil scare easily, but are often too spineless to become genuinely angry. They’ll wring their hands, tut feebly, and maybe even mumble incoherently before going on with their bigoted preconceived notions. The side of good on the other hand will scoff at evil when it can, or maintain a polite public face while scoffing in private.

Of course, this extends into libraries too! When it comes to PDF’s, the side of evil will use FOP and apache malware. The side of good on the other hand will go further afield and nuzzle up to iText and other lesser known brands.

To be fair, there are many people that straddle than big fat blurry line between good and evil. To you I say your flimflamming cannot last forever. Sooner or later, you will be forced to commit to either the forces of good or forces of evil. The forces of evil have the strength of numbers. They have untold peons, peasants, and halfwits bleating their cause. The forces of good are few, but as long as this isn’t real life, the forces of good will win out in the end.

These days, things have improved so much at Sun that one can be quite legitimately surprised when a J2EE/web type spec is released that has not grown from the user community.

The EJB spec for instance is now the poster child of community driven specifications. The whole existence of J2EE 5.0 stems from the needs of the community and the developers on the ground. Virtually every single specification under that umbrella has been revved either through pressure from users, or with the goal of allowing users to do what they do better.

The one amazing exception to this rule is Java Server Faces. To date, I have yet to see a single positive review of this spec that comes from a non-Struts user. WebWork, Tapestry, Spring, and pretty much every non-Struts framework users scoff and laugh at JSF. It’s ugly, it’s not intuitive, and it is hellbent on the Microsoft style approach; fuck the users and force them to use clever tools.

While this wouldn’t have been surprised a year or two ago (many of the specs were run the same way, driven by a few lunatics with bizarre needs rather than actual Real People), it is simply unacceptable these days.

I won’t go into the details of why JSF is crap. That’s a separate topic and there is already plenty of material out there, in fact you’d have trouble finding any ‘normal’ web developer speaking positively of it (once you discount people on the expert group, jsf vendors, and struts users).

So I beg of you all, don’t use JSF, boycott it, avoid it all you can. Do not let it thrive or prosper. We don’t want it improved or tweaked, we want it to die the horrible painful death it so richly deserves.

I can see the argument that the platform needs something like it. Taking struts and turning it into a specification is not the answer. The JSF group is in many ways much less constrained that the EJB group by backward compatibility. The few people who have chosen to adopt JSF can be (rightfully) dismissed as lunatics who expect to jump through hoops for every iteration anyway. Mission-critical JSF is practically an oxymoron, and there are many many great ideas in the community that should be leveraged and incorporated. Tainting the J2EE 5.0 spec with something so untested and universally reviled by the hardcore enterprise people, bread and butter webapp folk, and the hobbyist web monkey kids will do the the entire platform a great disservice.

I’m told that Russell Beattie managed to get fired YET AGAIN. What’s truly astounding is that anyone would actually hire that fat oaf. Here’s a hint to any prospective employers: Taking on nazi ashcroftesque democrats who change jobs more often than they change underwear is about as wise as jousting with a lump of turd.

Also, a clarification. I’m not Jordanian or of Jordanian descent, I’m from another middle east country altogether. Even more amazingly than that, I’m not a pilot, nor am I balding.

I’m glad I don’t know anyone who has commit access to jikes. I’m glad that when I wish ill onto those people, when I want them to die slow painful agonising deaths, it’s not causing harm to a friend or acquaintance.

I had previously ranted and raved about the obscenity that was jikes 1.19; how it so gleefully quoted from a book. I was assured by many people that they’ve gone way overboard, and will tone down the output to be sane and a lot less offensive.

Foolishly, I upgraded to jikes 1.21. Every time I compile now, I want to immolate those chocolate log miners. I am filled with such rage, such fury, that no punishment or torture method seems severe enough to slake my thirst for revenge and retribution.

Why in god’s name do I need to be informed, by default, of every time I use a local variable to shadow a member field? Why can’t I not specify a break in my switch statements if I so choose? The language allows both and has VERY explicit clear rules about what happens and how it’s treated. If it’s good enough for the goddam JLS, it’s good enough for me. You, jikes twats, have NO right deciding my coding habits for me. You’re a bunch of fuckwitted angsty IBMers who think that all they need to do is tug some linux/OSS penis to be admired and loved by all.

It’s one thing to write a custom compiler for children just taking their first java steps. It’s quite another to foist this disgusting filth onto people who supposedly know what they’re doing. I mean, we can forgive the fact that it emits different bytecode to javac (look at the code generated for asserts, for example), we can forgive the fact that its website is one of the most difficult to navigate or find any info at, but really, even us seasoned bitter cynics have our limits.

The problem is that the language has moved on since jikes 1.18 (the last usable version). The ONLY reason I prefer using jikes is to avoid the JVM startup time. It’s depressing and frustrating that one is forced to choose between taking the startup hit with javac, or sticking to an old version of jikes before it was taken over by a horde of braindamaged fuckwits unable to accept that there might be developers out there who aren’t quite as dimwitted or spastic as they are. On the bright side, those folks make a very powerful argument for the merits of genetic cleansing.

On the whole, theserverside.com is a pretty decent site. It has some mildly interesting articles, the product announcements are relevant, and the editorialising is kept to a pleasant minimum. The technical content is also surprisingly relevant and topical.

The whole thing however is let down by regular baiting and shilling by some users/authors, who seem to go through moments of panic when the comment count drops for a few successive stories.

So what to do in this case? Why, say something controversial! Over the years, TSS has pretty much identified both of the ‘hot’ topics (ie, JBoss, and opensource) as great obsessive fanatic breeding grounds. So when things flag, you can be sure you’ll have some link to a highly dubious article saying one or the other is great (nobody is offended when either is portrayed as not THAT great, interestingly enough).

A particularly funny/offensive example of this was a ‘is JBoss ready for the enterprise’ advert run there a couple of weeks ago. This is supposedly an objective evaluation of said product by some random guy who is trying to determine whether it’s good enough to use, based on some dodgy metrics. Fair enough, nothing too odd about that. The fun bit is when you realise that the author happens to be the CEO of a company that does training and consulting for open source products. Gosh, and he found that some opensource product is in fact ready for the enterprise?! This is NOTEWORTHY to him? I mean really, shouldn’t it be sufficient for him to say ‘my business is all about open source in the enterprise’ for the rest of us to realise that he thinks it’s a good idea?

While much of the blame should be placed on the genius who authorised this offensive article, tss users should also shoulder much of the responsibility.

Cameron, please please stop baiting these poor people. It’s a well documented fact that Gavin Fleury has claimed the deeper shades of purple for his exclusive use lately. The poor guy’s head will at some point explode if you keep taunting him so subtly.

See, one has to understand something about these jboss kids. They’re very, very sensitive. Their favourite movie is When Harry Met Sally. They cry when they hear sad songs, and they blow up when you say their favourite toy isn’t your favourite toy. So why keep baiting them like this? I mean, it’s fun and all, but the novelty value of torturing a bunch of kids wears off fairly quickly. So please, let’s just ignore them and stop their tedious yapping.

It’s pretty sad that TSS regularly lowers its tone by such postings. Perhaps they have some kind of freakish javalobby envy syndrome, and aspire to to scale those admirable heights of crapulence, a dubious goal at the best of times.