The BileBlog

The lunch keynote was provided courtesy of Oracle, and was (somewhat controversially titled ‘Does J2EE (still) matter’.

The speaker however seems to have some very odd concepts of what is and what isn’t J2EE. His example of ‘non-J2EE’ stuff included things like Spring and other such frameworks, all of which would be rather pointless without J2EE.

This actually touches on a pretty surprising misconception that a lot of the monkeys here have. Spring (to cite an example) is NOT a replacement for J2EE. Without J2EE, Spring would not exist. All is it is a extra layer of civilisation that sits on top of the J2EE stack and makes life easier for a certain class of problems.

A good point raised by the speaker also is the difference between how audiences receive open sores crap vs vendor solution crap. An open source talk is applauded for some reason and viewed as somehow being altruistic or noble, whereas the exact same talk delivered about a non-OS product is viewed as an underhanded vendor pitch. There is something particularly revolting about seeing all these talk about custom proprietary solutions (spring, tapestry, random OS crap) being viewed as legitimate in such conferences, whereas closed source stuff being treated as red haired step child that must never be spoken about in civilised society.

Next we move onto saying how great EJB3 is. Gosh, do these people never get tired of this? We get it already, EJB3 is nicer than EJB2. We believe it, lets move on for fuck’s sake. Please please, no more words of wisdom about how wonderfully testable EJB3 is. I’m going to stab the next person who says ‘lightweight container’ in the face with a blunt spoon.

Of course, no EJB3 talk is complete without code samples. Instead of the savvy pertinent snippets that Linda’s talks have (come back Linda, all is forgiven!) we here have huge huge chunks of code that nobody can actually read. This is actually pretty common throughout many talks. What is it about writing code in a small font that’s so sexually gratifying to these speakers?

Having pimped oracle’s EJB3 stuff and convinced us all that JDeveloper is a horrible IDE, we now move onto the joys of JSF.

Oracle has, for some inexplicable reason, developed a disturbing JSF fetish. The speaker is, surprise surprise, one of those dolts who thinks that JSF is there to be written by competent ‘by-hand’ type developers. There really is an idiot born every minute.

The hilarity really kicks off when Ted shows off orablogs. His concept of ‘customisable UI’ is firmly 1998 material. The site looks like someone had a terrible underwear accident, and accidentally smeared the outcome on a webpage. This portion of the presentation captures perfectly a very common blind spot that java web monkeys have. Why, for the love of god, do these people think that a developer should be allowed anywhere near a UI? Most developers couldn’t design a UI if their worthless little lives depended on it. They’re all straight lines and table borders and ‘ooh look at mee look at meee I’m xhtml compatible!’

Even more ironically, his example of ‘how easy it is to write JSF’ by hand does everything it can to prove it isn’t. It requires a custom IDE, the code block for a table is roughly the size of a respectable swing custom component (including painting code). The IDE is all about custom panels for editing properties, and there’s so much JSF awareness that the whole thing makes for a great ‘fuck you java developers!’ demo. They should sell it to IBM in fact, it’s THAT bad.

To add icing to the cake, half the stuff he tries doesn’t even work. I have a lot of sympathy for demos going wrong, but this really is somewhat of a comedy of errors on so many levels. On the plus side, the whole talk looks and feels a lot more relevant given how abysmal Macromedia’s talk was yesterday. So here’s a tip for future speakers, make sure that the previous session the users go to really, really sucks. That way you can fling poo at the poor little bastards and they’ll still feel mildly grateful.

Moral of the story? Don’t buy Oracle, they’re just a wannabe IBM. If you must buy Oracle, you can do penance by sticking any JDeveloper CD’s you can find in as many microwaves as you can find.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2005 at 5:16 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.