jakarta style gurus

It is with some bemusement that I see that jakarta.apache.org has finally acknowledged, however implicitly, than their frontpage is possibly the worst designed page on the internet since early 1995.

A minor facelift seems to have taken place. The only discernible benefit so far though seems that it’s actually possible to get to a project without scrolling for 10 pages first.

Sadly though, the rest of the site remains the same pathetic incompetent avoided-all-human-computer-interaction-classes-I’m-a-geek-forfuckssake attitude we’ve come to know and love from those inbred gimps.

Let us begin at the frontpage, shall we? We have an astounding page full of body blurbage which is utterly, completely, and thoroughly irrelevant for EVERYONE.

This might come as a shocker, but I have yet to find a single person outside of the apache circlejerk who gives a flying fuck about the licensing scheme, jakarta’s teatsucking relationship to apache, project management, announcement lists, volunteerism, the ASF, or any of that gibberish that befouls that page. Wake up you rumprangers, people go there to download your pathetic soulless code because it’s free, not because you have the right principles, attitude, buttock size, or genital flora.

So if you want to cater to your actual users, perhaps you could get rid of your ‘look ma, I can put my finger in my bum and wiggle it’ attitude and provide information that might actually be relevant, in a terse and useful form that doesn’t hide the NEWS (that’s changeable content, you know, the stuff people tend to come back for) off the page and forces people to scroll to get at it.

The download page of course is still there in it’s delightful awkwardness, except that insult has been added to injury in the form of an arbitrary grouping of projects at the top. Apparently jakarta’s output is now 75% commons-jizz. Analogies to a malignant cancer would be insulting to cancer at this point.

It’s all so deliciously opensoresy. ‘People find the page awkward, I know! I’ll add MORE to it to clarify!’. The one mantra of open sores is ‘never ever delete’. Nice to see jakarta genuflecting to its almighty god, and ‘fixing’ all issues by piling on their own aromatic blend of shite onto the midden heap.

Of course, the subprojects rise to the occasion as well, and ensure that they’re not out-incompetented by their filthy home. Alexandra for instance presents us with a plain sad page proclaiming its demise. BCEL’s developers seem to display their logo the way a shameless parent would display their retarded child’s latest crayon masterpiece. Who needs titles or headers with such a snazzy logo!

BSF tries to at least look consistent, but things start slipping by the time you hit Cactus, which tries to look consistent but has that trademark king Midas touch of shit that only maven can bestow. The delightful generic ‘I am a fuckwitted asshat’ that only maven users can announce with a mere stylesheet.

Commons of course is where the real geniuses hang out. Following the parent’s lead, the frontpage goes out of its way to tell you everything you couldn’t possibly want to know about commons, and forcing you to scroll to actually find any of the filthy commons-* poogems. Still, I’m glad that every damn project goes out of its way to inform you that it’s part of jakarta, how it’s licensed, how they run their mailing lists, who the developers are, what their favourite toilet experiences are and whatnot. The other fifty thousand mentions of said subjects all over the site could easily be overlooked, so they can be forgiven for this repetition.

ECS is up next, and here we have developerhood at its best, with documentation proudly proclaimed to be ‘TestBed.java’ and javadocs. Hivemind of course is a pleasant jab in the eyes next, with that astoundingly large header than can only come from boys that are lacking in size in other departments. Still, at least I get that nifty doodah that lets me change the font size on every page, a crucial feature without which modern day web browsing would be incomplete. Snore.

The list just goes on and on and on. It’s truly amazing to me that there can be so many developers working on/for/with apache, yet not one of which seems to have a single design bone in their miserable nerdy little bodies. This stuff really, really isn’t hard. Just pretend you’re a user. What would you like to see? Surprising as it may be, it’s generally not fun to go somewhere that spends all of its time telling you boring irrelevant details about itself. A user will (rightly think) ‘what can you do for me?’ and any site that fails to answer that should have its authors throttled with their own intestines, or at least legally banned from being anywhere within 100 meters of a computer.

42 Responses to “jakarta style gurus”

  1. Anonymous Says:

    jakarta–

  2. Anonymous Says:

    bagina++

  3. destr0 Says:

    Your actually down to insulting site design now? Is this the start of the downhill slope?

  4. Vati Says:

    It was really pain in the neck to find what you were looking for. Especially when you wanted to get the “NOT-LATEST” version of a jar.

  5. Howard M. Lewis Ship Says:

    You finally get around to biling HiveMind and the best you can do is criticize the HTML *style*? What a letdown. However, having the size of my equipment attacked on the basis of the size of my project logo is a novelty … normally, such attacks stem from the size of my motorcycle.

  6. Anonymous Says:

    I’d rather just traverse a raw html directory hierarchy in the browser to get to the damn software rather than click and scroll around the pages trying to figure out how to get ahold of the software. Jakartas not the only apache project that suffers like this… the xml.apache.org site is a similar mess.

  7. Anonymous Says:

    To all those which feel attacked by this: read it again, then learn HTML!

  8. m. kapu Says:

    hellow!!?!!?
    here madhu kapu from satayam!!!
    instead of boring bile about apache why doesn’t you bile on this spring bald guy?!!! this will funner.
    thx please!!!
    madhu kapu from satayam!!

  9. Rick Hightower Says:

    It is not just a matter of learning HTML. I know HTML. I create ugly sites. I hire designers when I want a site to look good.

    I am style imparied. I know what looks good but I don’t have the time or patience to push bits. I can have someone do it a lot better than me at a fraction of the cost.

    I am sure there are many developers that are styled impaired.

    Apache’s look and feel does not prevent me from using the libs. I’d rather the libs work than the site look good.

    Besides if you don’t like the site, I am sure that Apache will give your money back for the software you didn’t buy.

  10. Rick Hightower Says:

    It is not just a matter of learning HTML. I know HTML. I create ugly sites. I hire designers when I want a site to look good.

    I am style imparied. I know what looks good but I don’t have the time or patience to push bits. I can have someone do it a lot better than me at a fraction of the cost.

    I am sure there are many developers that are styled impaired.

    Apache’s look and feel does not prevent me from using the libs. I’d rather the libs work than the site look good.

    Besides if you don’t like the site, I am sure that Apache will give your money back for the software you didn’t buy.

  11. Rick Hightower Says:

    Regarding:
    “instead of boring bile about apache why doesn’t you bile on this spring bald guy?!!! this will funner. thx please!!! ”

    First why you gotta pick on the follically impaired.

    I already biled Spring… didn’t you see…

    http://jroller.com/page/RickHigh/20050107#spring_plug

    See…
    http://www.arc-mind.com/careers.htm

    For a picture of the follically imparied (me).

    Hair loss is caused by thinking too much….

    Isn’t Hani follically imparied?

    BTW How does Hani know about Howard’s equipment size?

  12. Biggus Dickus Says:

    Hani, Oh my master! Wondrous as thou art, adore your ramblings as I do, thou knowest that HTML is for incompetent cheap-labour types. Developers are far above scumbag web pages. I’d leave my employers immediately if they dared to ask me to code HTML/Javascript/JSP or any of that pallid shit. You want HTML jocks, then go and give your secretary wetdream-weaver. Developers – even bad Apache developers – don’t do that stuff.

    Biggus.

  13. Rick Hightower Says:

    There are developers who can do both and enjoy doing both. More power to you!

  14. Funky Marc Says:

    P0rnstars can do both and enjoy doing both too!

  15. Anonymous Says:

    Style-impaired? Let me try to revisit that in a slightly different context:

    “I know what good java code looks like. But I do not have the time or patience to ‘push bits’. Therefore I hire other cheaper developers (abroad) to clean up what I know is a mess”.

    The attitude that “HTML is for cheap labour UI secretaries for which I am really toooo good” is one of the reasons shit like JSP survived til today and is only now replaced with good stuff like Tapestry/JSF. Why? Because from the beginning on, the UI part has always been the most neglected part of J2EE, since developers do not like it.

    Saying that you “know” HTML btw is like an HTML designer saying “I know Java”, once he wrote some System.outs or a servlet. What is knowing? I laugh at myself these days thinking that I once put “Java” on my resume 8 years ago. I merely knew the syntax. Same goes for the HTML skills of most J2EE developers – just syntax, but no real knowledge.

    A good read about this topic is “Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance”

  16. Biggus Dickus Says:

    “Rick Hightower”? I suppose if he’s Richard he could be called “Dick Hightower” – like a porn star indeed. Oo er.. are you after my job Dick? I’m the Biggus Dickus around here sonny.

  17. Stabbing Cadaver Says:

    “Let us begin at the frontpage, shall we? We have an astounding page full of body blurbage which is utterly, completely, and thoroughly irrelevant for EVERYONE.”

    This sounds like a self-critique, Hani…

  18. Anonymous Bastard Says:

    Hani,

    When I go to http://www.go-epix.net and choose Arabic, why isn’t the text right-adjusted? I can recommend the DIR attribute, or if you prefer CSS, the ‘direction’ property.
    You obviously must not care much for your fellow Jordanian pilots, who may or may not be follicle impaired like yourself. This, however, is no excuse.

  19. Rick Hightower Says:

    Hmmmm…

    RE: Style-impaired? Let me try to revisit that in a slightly different context…

    We are in violent agreement. It takes skill to be really good at creating a good looking page. That skill cost a bit less than good developers. I don’t set the price.

    I know I ran a company where we employed both. This is not to say one is inferior to the other.

    You have to know what you are good at…. ;)

  20. Anonymous Says:

    Rick, you repeatedly posting your valueless comment here… What a tedious windbag.

  21. Rick Hightower Says:

    RE: Rick, you repeatedly posting your valueless comment here… What a tedious windbag

    I like to play with fire.

  22. jw Says:

    Can you fuck faces stop confusing HTML ANYTHING with the ability to create usable and easy-on-the-eyes pages. They are not related what so ever. My best friend is an excellent graphical artist, he sucks at HTML and JavaScript.

  23. jw Says:

    Can you fuck faces stop confusing HTML ANYTHING with the ability to create usable and easy-on-the-eyes pages. They are not related what so ever. My best friend is an excellent graphical artist, he sucks at HTML and JavaScript.

  24. jw Says:

    Ahahaha JRoller is such a piece of burninated pig terd. What the hell is wrong with the comment function now?

  25. Fernando Racca Says:

    hahahaha, Hani you are a fucking java jester!

    look, your comment page also talks about Apache style: HTML Syntax: Disabled

    xD

    hail to king Hani!

  26. Joshua Bloch Says:

    Why did James Gosling get fired from the sperm bank? He got caught drinking on the job

  27. Anonymous Says:

    There is one sure way to never to offend anyone: don’t speak.

    There is one sure way to never be Criticized: don’t produce anything.

    The more you produce and the more speak the more you will offend and be criticized.

    Take it like a man.

  28. Anonymous Says:

    There is one sure way to never to offend anyone: don’t speak.

    There is one sure way to never be Criticized: don’t produce anything.

    The more you produce and the more speak the more you will offend and be criticized.

    Take it like a man.

  29. jw Says:

    If everyone were to publish/speak their crapola, then we’d end up with.. er.. jboss, maven and apache. Holy crap!

  30. java master Says:

    i’m a java master because I make web sites with coldfusion right?

  31. Anonymous Says:

    regarding:
    If everyone were to publish/speak their crapola, then we’d end up with.. er.. jboss, maven and apache. Holy crap!

    I was thinking that we would end up with what jw says.

    jw is asked to visit:

    http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail20.html

  32. jw Says:

    Yet, dispite him deleting lots of crapola, there’s so much very very competent Strongbad out there, and so little sucky Strongbad. Who would have thought.

  33. Howard Lewis Ship Says:

    > BTW How does Hani know about Howard’s equipment size?

    What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

  34. Carlos Sanchez's Weblog Says:

    [Trackback] Many people say that Maven is more difficult to use than Ant, I just don’t agree.

    I don’t agree that Maven learning curve is steeper than Ant, the fact is that many people already know Ant, but for newbies Maven hides all the low level stu…

  35. bitchslapper Says:

    Suggestion for Next Bile:

    Use less references to feces and more references to urine, mucus, pus, or milky discharge. I’m getting tired of your obsession with all things scatological. Give the other “body juices” some equal time!

  36. bitchslapper Says:

    Edict: Less references to feces and more references to urine, mucus, pus, or milky discharge. I’m getting tired of your obsession with all things scatological. Give the other fluids some equal time!

  37. bitchslapper Says:

    Edict: Less references to feces and more references to urine, mucus, pus, or milky discharge. I’m getting tired of your obsession with all things scatological. Give the other fluids some equal time!

  38. Berlin Brown Says:

    I think this guy did it right, gentoo.org, notice every page is an XML document that conforms to the XML document standard that have on the site. And it looks good.

    Gentoo Site

    An open source project, that probably has few web developers, good job.

  39. Berlin Brown Says:

    I think this guy did it right, gentoo.org, notice every page is an XML document that conforms to the XML document standard that have on the site. And it looks good.

    Gentoo Site

    An open source project, that probably has few web developers, good job.

  40. Anonymous Says:

    2 many cooks in the kitchen – too many nerds in IT and too many dickheads on the web

  41. Darryl Says:

    What we really need is you new Friggin framework.

  42. SHRIKANT DUBEY FROM SATYAM Says:

    am style imparied. I know what looks good but I don’t have the time or patience to push bits. I can have someone do it a lot better than me at a fraction of the cost.

    I am sure there are many Professionals that are styled impaired. Go well …… Shrikant

Leave a Reply