The BileBlog

Ahh, what a year it’s been! So many abysmal projects, so many predictions coming true. So much delightful abuse hurled in so many weird and wonderful directions.

January kicked off with a good laugh in the general direction of a certain ‘open source java programming’ book. Unsurprisingly, the book is now pretty hard to come by on any shelves. After all was said and done, the one thing I think everyone can agree on is that the whole thing was a deeply embarrassing experience and I’d be stunned if any one of the four miscreants would ever work on a book with each other again. Jon Tirsen’s J3EE ‘joke’ was mocked thoroughly, but thankfully thoughtworks has kept him and his friends busy enough working on menial demeaning codemonkey tasks that their brand of excrement is being pooped out at a much slower and more tolerable rate.

Amazing, the non-story of open sourcing java still has the odd lunatic trying desperately to revive it. If only these OSS zealots would apply their zeal and pinko commie approach to their code and documentation instead of hurling it feebly into poorly written blogpuke, the world would be a far happier place. February also saw my continued bafflement at the lack of OSS project deaths. Thankfully reality restored itself and Jakarta Avalon got the long long overdue decapitation it so richly deserved. The only downside so such events is the stigma of doing a Nelsonesque ‘haa haa’ at said hapless projects, or surely half of java land would have rejoiced in a very public and gleeful manner.

Jikes of course continues to be developed by a bunch of crusty wankstains. The insidious incestuous relationship between that compiler and the Effective Java book is a startling marriage that neither god nor man can sanction. I wonder how Bloch’s moving to Google will affect jikes though. Will compiler warnings now include url’s to google groups, perhaps an adword or two to spice things up? An automatic geek penis fondler and dirtbox tickler with every successful build?

Of course, most of the projects predicted to fail have obliged in a most disturbing manner. It’s depressing in many ways, how little has changed. XDoclet 2 is still nowhere. Groovy, against all odds, still managed to go nowhere. Geronimo’s original estimate of an August deliverate is beyond hilarious at this point and was clearly a joke in very poor taste. Axiondb (remember THAT?) is dead in the water (but lives on in the form of various commons-fapfest projects). IDEA’s eap’s are still cruddy. JDJ awards are still….an accurate reflection of the industry. The fine folks at Jakarta are still debating 3 different metametalogging frameworks (ugli, enterprise logging, and something else). Anyone who knows anything about logging will now finally admit that clogging is a dismal failure. JavaLobby still runs its ‘Java is dead! Is Java dead? Is Sun dead? Is IBM great? OhlookwhereIvestuckMicrosoftsPenisToday?’ gamut of parlour tricks. TSS still posts astoundingly tedious blog entries. Hint to any aspiring TSS news item people, change your name to Cedric, Mike, Rickard, or Cameron and you can talk about your fetish of cramming dogturd in your ears while singing I am a little teapot wearing nothing but a nipple clamp and you’d still have a pretty good chance of making it to TSS’s frontpage.

Of course, no list of cheating dishonest scoundrels is complete without JBoss. Oh what entertainment they provided this last year! Bill’s social ungraces, Nathalie’s erudite and disturbingly out of place damage control, Marc’s drug induced idiocy/mania/goodgoddidhereallyjustpostinallcapsyetagain. Remember the old astroturfing incident? On the bright side, their VC’s have pretty much banned them from posting their brand of smegma, so while things are less fun, the world is certainly a better place for it. Of course, product wise, JBoss 4.0 is still really, really crap. Bill Burke is still desperate to prove to SOMEONE that he isn’t as AO(P) clueless as he seems. Still, pretty impressive how much shit people would like flung in their faces, as long as it’s free. So Geronimo folks take heart, your silly ‘integration’ project might have a fart’s chance in hell after all, despite being a valiant attempt at being the greatest ‘worst of breed’ showcase every assembled.

Oh, and Maven is still rubbish, and I’m rapidly finding out that there is fact a group of people who might be even stupider than Maven developers; Maven users.

So there you have it. Java land hasn’t changed that much, EJB3 is even further away, jakarta is now focussed on churning out commons-turdlings, and we have a whole other year of non-events and tedious regurgitation to look forward to. Wonderful.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2005 at 9:39 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.