The BileBlog

Maybe I’m old, cynical and jaded. Maybe I’m bitterly jealous that I had to cancel my trip to JavaOne at the last minute, or maybe I have very low tolerance for bad writers. The end result of this is that I am finding the coverage of javaone from most (well, all so far) bloggers to be horrifically boring, dull, repetitive, and lacking of any sort of personality.

Maybe that’s not so surprising. Geeks are, after all, geeky types. Bloggers in particular are delighted that they have reason to post without having to actually think. Even worse are those who feel that their blog is a note-taking exercise, there for their personal usage, totally devoid of any awareness of the poor bastard readers who have to wade through that nonsense.

Maybe the initial awe factor is too high, and it takes time for their cute little brains to slowly digest all the material they’ve ingested. Maybe in the coming days, we’ll see more useful observations and more interesting coverage where the observer has actually tried to put actual thought and effort into communicating, instead of the current mindless drone approach.

So what has happened at JavaOne so far? We have about forty bloggers all repeating some variation of the following:

Given how popular appfuse seems to be, I thought I’d give it a try. Now, I personally have no such need of such a tool, but if it actually does what it says on the tin, then it certainly would be worth knowing as something that might be recommended to people wanting a quick start of some sort.

Oh how naive I was! I laughed, I cried, I fumbled about uselessly trying to make it do things. Appfuse is, without a doubt, one astoundingly confused product.

Where shall we start? Well, if you want to do anything other than stick with every single default, you’re up poocreek sans paddles. Let’s start with the installer. It uses izpack (a fine product), but of course, goes for a net install and shows NO INDICATION of progress as big chunks of data are downloaded. Furthermore, if you manage to click on the right combination of things (just my luck), you end up with an installer that’s hung (not in a good way) at 1%, with absolutely no hint of what you should do at this point. Cry like a girl? Wait like a man? Shake your fist at how futile life can be? Still, I tried quitting and examining what it so kindly deposited in the chosen target directory. There’s a build.xml which is about as functional as Geronimo. If you rip it open and peek within, you’ll find it’s actually a buildfile to build the INSTALLER, and could not possibly be more useless to an end user.

Alright, let’s give up on the installer. It was clearly knocked up as a side effect of a drunken stupor. These things happen.

So I go for some other download (binary, getting things to build from such dodgy characters is a bit too wild even for me). Hm, first hurdle, I MUST have tomcat installed. Not only that, but I must also faff about setting environment variables. How user friendly!

Now, I can accept requiring tomcat to be able to deploy the excrement this fine app defecates, but really, MUST the reload task be declared for the whole build file, such that you can’t even do an ant clean without tomcat installed?

Things steadily go from bad to worse. The sloppiness and slipshod I’ve experienced so far is not an accident, it’s a way of life for this app. I try to generate a project, and I’m prompted for my project’s package….twice. Hint to any aspiring UI experts, don’t ask people to type something in twice, it’s rude and pointless and only says ‘I’m retarded and cannot remember what you just told me.’

The project generation phase also kindly informed me that it has autodetected mysql. This was mildly surprising to me, as I do not have mysql installed anywhere on this machine. Maybe it detected something Out There? Maybe it was some kind of sinister warning about the inevitability of mysql taking over the DB world (har har)? Don’t be fooled by the documentation, getting this pile of festering doggie droppings to work with anything other than mysql is far from being a simple switch somewhere.

Of course, the buildfile is what you’d expect from a web monkey pretending to be a programmer. Half the targets don’t work, nor is it particularly clear what they do. I downloaded the webwork version, and ant -projecthelp suggested a ‘install-webwork’ target. This seemed like a promising starting point. Alas, that target doesn’t even apply for the webwork build, it’s for choosing webwork when you haven’t just downloaded the webwork specific version!

Nevermind that, at least the project skeleton it generates is a good robust starting point that one can confidently move forward with.

Haha, only joking, of course. Every object creates builder objects in hashCode and toString. That’s right, every time hashCode is called, an object is constructed and the java gods sacrifice a baby jesus in your name as a result. It’s comforting almost to see such solid proof of how absolutely evil jakarta commons is, when people are encouraged to do this kind of thing.

Even worse, the project’s directory layout is bound to confuse a seasoned webapp veteran, let alone the target audience for this frankenstein of an application. It’s as if someone got very angry and gathered up a bunch of directories, then violently flung them at a filesystem in order to cause maximum distress and pain to the world at large.

Of course, the project uses xdoclet. Now, xdoclet certainly has its uses. Building web.xml is NOT one of these uses. I don’t know what kind of giant supergenius newbies Raibly is expecting, but even I don’t have the heart to tell them than to edit web.xml, they’ll have to find the appropriate fragment of it (out of 11) and slot in the right thing, then rebuild to get the aggregate descriptor generated.

Of course, the forums and users of this application are the icing on the cake. Poor perplexed lost souls, endlessly befuddled by how and why things are the way they are. Those who do stick with it invariably realise what a completely spastic idea it was to start with such a rotten festering foundation.

Matt Raible once blogged that he’s perplexed by his popularity and the world viewing him as some kind of expert. Little did I know how right he was then. He is, as he proclaimed, a depressingly average web monkey who was catapulted into the limelight through a freak accident of nature. Of the other hand, maybe their little hearts are set on him, their minds filled with possibilities as they wisely ponder ‘If this idiot can do it, so can I!’

PS Yes, I have google ads now. About time I get some money off you losers.

There aren’t that many players in the java enterprise mail server playground. Of that pitiful field, apache james is probably the lone player.

James is…well…interesting. For one thing, it’s based on the doomed and dead Avalon. All their news says regarding this demise is that James is in fact alive and kicking, but cleverly sidestepping the whole ‘wtf will we do now’ issue. Most wise!

In typical open source fashion, someone wrote the documentation a few years back and has long since moved onto bigger and better things. Witness ‘This stable and robust container (Avalon) provides a strong foundation for the James server.’ Stable and robust maybe in the manner that a corpse in severe rigor mortis is stable and robust.

As it typical of such projects, the decisions made are are unfathomable, perplexing, and deeply disturbing. Why does the admin ‘console’ need to be telnet based? Why is there no mention of IMAP? Why does the mailet api look and feel like it’s 1998?

Despair not however, there is a silver lining! As much as it pains me to admit this, I’ve actually been working on the jboss mails services thingyjobby. Encouraged by Scott Stark’s proclamations of its death, I thought it’d be hilarious if I were to pick it up and contribute to it.

So the last couple of months have been pretty busy, and I’ve been submitting patches here and there. The only galling thing of course is seeing the smug self-centered look on Andy Oliver’s horrible beard, but such is life, and as long as we stick to the task at hand, we’re able to communicate with surprising success.

So why are jboss mail services better? Well, it’s a well maintained product for one thing. Someone actually bothers keep the wiki updated, it integrates well with other components, and has a rich and vibrant community of interested users and contributors.

Best of all, it has IMAP support as well as a host of other features. The forums get dozens of interesting posts a day, and clusters like springbots on Rod Johnson’s teats (lets be honest, mail server that don’t cluster are yesterday’s tech, unfit for today’s brave new world).

So as much as it pains me, I must recommend this product. Sure, it’s rough around the edges, but who isn’t?

Oh and just to taunt you losers, I’d like to now brag that my proposal for a JavaOne presentation has been accepted! ‘Male Services For The Enterprise’, muhahaha! I’ll be discussing the stuff in this entry in more detail.

The thoughtworks phenomenon is quite an interesting one, and going beyond the loud and obnoxious public persona of many of their employees, the whole thing is based on a fascinating model.

The ‘leap’ that Thoughtworks has made is that it has explicitly acknowledged the need to pander to its employees basest weaknesses and vanities. The powers that be have done an absolutely brilliant job of brainwashing all these kids into thinking that they’re some kind of legion of prophets out fighting the good fight. Some bright management type has understood the developer mindset on a very fundamental level. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that in terms of the actual job, consulting is astoundingly tedious and unrewarding, for the type of projects that that sort of company takes on. There’s nothing satisfying, nurturing, or sexually titillating about the experience. These young kids are hurled out into highly crappy locations (Dixons anyone?) and made to work on horrible horrible things.

So how to retain such staff? If you’re a big consulting company, the individual ceases to matter. Trying to make each person happy simply won’t scale. So instead, you develop a culture whereby the employees learn to tug on each others genitalia, saving everyone a lot of money and hassle. So these poor kids get to spend their out of work hours doing worky things with their coworkers. Thus geek night and whatnot. Everybody wins because the socially dysfunctional young kids get to feel glamorous and spend quality circlejerk time with one another, and the company doesn’t have to waste any real company time on these children.

To thoughtworks’ credit however, this is a very calculated and cynical policy, and if you talk to some of their more senior wizened guys, they’ll smirk and wink cynically; they know exactly how the System works and how successful it is.

However, there is a bit of a beast being unleashed. The more entertained these kids are, the less satisfying their ‘day jobs’ are. You don’t have to look very far to find a thoughtworker that will rant and rave for hours about how much their day job sucks.

With this disgruntlement come other more serious issues. As developers get bored, they’ll try and spend more of their time entertaining themselves. This will manifest itself in more time spent on the job on pointless irrelevant faffing about. Clients end up with less getting done, and overall getting worse value for money. Don’t believe me? Here’s an example. Obie Fernandez (a thoughtworker) posted a blog entry saying how great it is to get back to ruby after his day job, where it took him 2 days configuring jsp reloading in tomcat, and a week to add one (seemingly trivial) feature. Thoughtworks is indeed quite lucky to have customers that are so incompetent and undiscerning that wasting two days on configuring one of the most standard configurations these days in my-first-webapp-land seems reasonable and to be expected. Granted, he might have been exagerating (I hope he was), but that this kind of exageration is one he did in public is telling in and of itself.

Perhaps instead of having your geek nights filled with loudmouthed fatheads discussing how great it is to staple dangleberries from fowler’s beard to your pair’s genitalia while developing dependency injected TDD driven unit tests for ruby, you could maybe have some web app 101 courses. Maybe even start with the basics, like what container to use and how to reload jsp pages.

I have no doubt that this company, like every other normal company in the world, has some competent clued in people that have genuine skills beyond the ability of spasming wildly when confronted with any sort of qwerty configuration. Sadly, those people don’t seem to do much beyond sigh sadly (and quietly) at the collective shame inflicted on their employer by the (many) bad apples. Really, the company is a living justification for the silly (or perhaps not) ‘employees must follow this code of conduct when speaking out in public’ rules that all big companies have. Thoughtworks’ lack of one has made them somewhat of a laughing stock in certain circles.

While we’ve all snickered and laughed at the lightweight moniker every project bestows upon itself these days, I’m astounded by how many people take the whole idea very very seriously.

So to protect the innocent, I won’t name any names. Lets just say that I was in a certain irc channel that shall remain nameless, and overhearing a certain individual espousing the benefits of their ‘new’ IoC container.

When asked to list the differentiators of said container, the developer, with deadpan delivery, lists the first two advantages as ‘it’s lightweight’ and ‘it’s simple’.

Somewhat incredulously, we then proceeded to have possibly the funniest conversation I’ve had on irc in quite a while (which is saying something, considering the general hilarity of irc).

It all starts off innocently enough, with a casual inquiry as to what constitutes a lightweight container. The definitions offered (over the course of ten minutes of intense debate) were:

I realise I’ve probably harped on about this before, but it really is astounding how little shame certain bloggers have.

In a way, it’s admirable. It takes a lot of guts to proclaim to the world so gleefully that you’re a hapless incompetent spastic who can’t struggle your way out of a wet brown paper bag.

Of course, no such rant is complete without naming names and humiliating random people who have meant well and are in all likelihood affable friendly chaps. So let’s start with Jason Bell.

Jason Bell was at some point doing something at JDJ (thus his visibility). Jason’s real claim to fame however is his astounding ability to turn the most trivial events of daily life into obscenely tedious blog entries. How can we forget his endless quest for a consulting gig? His childlike amazement at the benefits of WiFi? His stunned (but very vocal) surprise at various hotels and their networkability.

It’s almost cute. He’s clearly a bit of a village bumpkin who lives out in some plebby little collection of mudhuts in the middle of England, so his amazement and wonder and trials and tribulation with the rigours of a life of an IT tosspot can perhaps be forgiven.

Then of course we have the legions of wannabe sysadmins. For this the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of linux and the colo cottage industry. Any little grunt who knows a smattering of command line tools (which lets be honest, is in fact much easier than figuring out windows) thinks that this somehow makes him qualified to run a server unassisted.

Predictably, the result more often than not is endless whines to the tune of ‘today, I’m moving providers, I’ll be spending the new few days (!) configuring everything and things will be back to normal soon’, ’sorry, my db died, I will be spending X days fixing stuff’, ‘my server was hacked, boohoo’, ‘I am switching blogging software because my significant other keeps laughing at my genitalia’, ‘my genitalia is broken, so I will add more ram to my server’.

So so many of these problems could be solved if this group of rumprangers were to ask themselves a very very simple question before vomiting all over their input device of choice, ‘is it conceivable that there exists a human being who might somehow find my blog, and having done so, read this entry, and having done so, found it not the worst possible use of a spare 20 seconds?’

Of course, once you add in the releasecriers (osx jdk 1.5 is out!), installfappers (today I installed X, looks interesting), linkhags (look here pointlessly for 3 seconds while I tell you to go there there and there!) and plain old yesfags (I agree) you’re left with about 3 worthwhile entries a day in this particular community. How’s that for conclusive proof that java people are clueless self-absorbed soulless degenerates?

So our Apache heros have now decided that it isn’t quite enough to prove to the world that they are abysmal failures at producing a J2EE container, they must now further prove their incompetence by attempting to produce a J2SE implementation too.

Where does one begin? These guys have not only lost the plot, they’ve also moved on to a different plane of reality altogether. It’s astounding to me the free time that these wankstains have. They are the pinnacle of open source, the ultimate proof that in a system where nothing is driven by economic, practical, or realistic goals, in an environment where time is always worthless, every fool and his genitalia will waggle every which way, simply because it’s physically possible to do so.

There’s something very revolting about polluting a clearly technical and practical field with so much religion and dogma. The apache incubator proposal for this travesty is a perfect illustration of the role of religion and faith in this obscene idea, stating that there is a ‘clear need’ for an open-source version of Java. Is there? Who is this clear to? Certainly no java developers who have been polled multiple times in a variety of venues. The open source spastics are always a loud and obnoxious minority. Perhaps Apache has been suckling a tad too zealously at the slashdot teat of knowledge.

Even funnier is the approach they’ll likely take, which is the exact same one that has made Geronimo the raging success it is today. Smear together separate yet distinctive piles of animal excrement in the hope that by mashing this all together, something tasty and useful will be produced. There’s a REASON that openEJB had all of 3 users for all these years you know.

I could at least partially understand the driver for Geronimo, since it was basically a bunch of greedy jboss rejects that wanted more recognition, a human weakness that we can all understand. In this case though, who are they trying to spite? Or will the ace up the sleeve be that IBM can use this to perpetuate the concept of Apache as their karma whore and universal dumping ground and ‘donate’ more of their pathetic attempts at producing useful code?

Even the JBoss guys are more coherent and easier to relate to than these loons. One can understand people being driven by greed and egomania. You can argue rationally with such people, even if you feel disdain and dislike for them. There’s something human and accessible there (to varying degrees). With the apache people, there’s a disturbing gleam in the eye that forces you to slowly back away. They’re zealots with that rabid frothing and insane cackle indicative of their willingness to die for their religion. No amount of rational debate can filter through. Even the merest attempt will result in drooling, furious hand waving, and brandishing of moral codes of conduct.

So for this obscene J2SE idea, we have another set of real winners being assembled. Who can deny the usefulness of kaffe! They even have partial support for JDK 1.1 AWT by now I’m sure! How about the performance benefits of Classpath? THEY even have a preliminary swing implementation! You can’t go wrong by integrating in ‘mindshare’ from GPL projects that were created purely out of religious beliefs instead of any practical needs eh, it’s a winning recipe for sure. The hilarity of attempting to lend legitimacy to this foolish idea by putting the names of the developers of those pathetic futile attempts on the list shows a mind firmly embedded in lalaland.

How can this not be blatantly obvious to everyone? Projects like kaffe and classpath are worse than worthless. Even the notoriously dimwitted java community knows better than to use such tripe, and these are the people who gleefully add commons-logging (clogging) to their projects while sporting that revolting shit-eating grin that’s all too familiar. These are the people who will swear up and down that jboss and tomcat are good projects that perform well. If even these people scorn the ideological bullshit that results in the genesis of crap like GPL implementations, why don’t they just die the quick miserable death they’ve so richly earnt?

On the plus side, we have a delightful architecture diagram for this new J2SE implementation! It shows all the layers in a cute boxy diagram. Hardware at the bottom, class library at the top. Gosh, no wonder they’re so optimistic, all the hard work has already been done! There’s a picture there that explains it all! If only Sun had access to such architectural geniuses, we might have a functional JVM by now. It’s breathtaking, it truly is. These people want to build a JVM and they have NOTHING. All they have is a crayon drawing, boundless faith, naive belief, and the cheerfulness of a village idiot. Their approach will basically to sit with thumbs firmly in anuses hoping for droppings from IBM, BEA, Sun, nd anyone else who needs to go whoring for some good PR without actually doing anything meaningful or useful to the population at large. The list of participants is there to add insult to injury in a way, a collection of misfits half of whom are some combination of incompetent, brain damaged, fanatic or quite simply clueless.

It’s astounding that while the outside world proves to us again and again that separation of church and state is a good thing, and is a winning recipe in terms of stability, growth, and fairness, we in the java community seem hellbent on marching in the opposite direction. No longer will market forces or the common good based on rational clear arguments be the guiding hand for our future. Instead a group of rabid religious degenerates with too much time on their hand and too much power and influence decide that open source must be preached everywhere and everyday. Damned be Apache, and damned be the the legions of filthy masses who do nothing more than clap idiotically like trained seals at the world around them. Your Pavlovian reactions are a disgrace to humanity.

Those gluecode kids have certainly been busy! First they hijack Geronimo, and then go on to out-trump JBoss’ ‘we sold our soul for 10 mil’ with their own ‘we sold OUR soul for just under 100 mil’. The progression of these two companies is somewhat amusing. Whatever JBoss does, gluecode/geronimo will do too (yes, the blurring line is deliberate), but with more style, panache, and screwyouness (and infinitely better marketing).

The funniest aspect of the whole IBM/Gluecode deal of course is what’d happen if the ex-jboss gluecode guys hand over their jboss copyrights to IBM. Remember when the jboss hive bragged of how much of hibernate their owned? Of how they owned 37.7% of tomcat? Well well, how the tables have turned! If the copyrights are handed over, IBM will own a percentage of the jboss source code! I don’t know exact figures, but 20% is certainly not a surprising amount. Will you jboss guys now learn, what goes around comes around? For all your penis waggling about ownership, now your own excrement is owned by none other than one of the companies you have a severe inferiority complex about; IBM.

Why would the gluecode guys fork over this copyright anyway? Well, it’s a matter of insurance. JBoss could, if it so chose, decide to go after these guys individually. JBoss however, despite how monumentally stupid they usually are, are unlikely to want to play that game with IBM and take them to court. IBM has far deeper pockets and is not beholden to VCs in the way JBoss is.

In fact, Marc Fleury’s comments about the gluecode buyout show that he can barely walk straight, such is the volume of soilage in his pants right now. The entry starts off mildly panicked and worried, and goes through the usual degeneration into outright frothing and spasming, saying that Geronimo is worthless and crap, and doesn’t even have an EJB3 implementation (apparently in lalaland, having an implementation of a in-progresss specification that should be deployed into a production environment is a sign of a mature enterprise product). Even funnier of course is that Marc, as a result, received one of the by-now-familiar bend-over-and-receive-some-tough-love from his VC’s, and the blog entry was edited to remove some of the loonier ramblings.

Having said all that, one has to give credit to IBM. Yet again, they have proven themselves adept at sweet talking the ASF into bending over and taking it sans lube or even a comforting reacharound consolation prize. I’m sure they’ll turn Geronimo into a worthy version of Websphere (or vice versa, the difference between green shit and brown shit is minimal), and even in a worst case scenario, it’ll be sufficiently civilised compared to jboss that those evildoers will finally get their just desserts.

UPDATEMinor correction, the unedited version was posted yesterday by Bob Bickel, the title was ‘Big Blue Gets Religion’. That entry was deleted, and the current entry by marcf is a slightly modified and cleaned up version. Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can find the original at http://www.javablogs.com/ViewEntry.action?id=211967. In your fat face, bob bickel!

As the latest EAP of IDEA nears completion (or more accurately, stumbles forward towards a ship date by carefully avoiding any semblance of completion) it’s time to dissect this latest release and issue forth my bi-annual IwanttostabIDEAloudmouthssinthegenitalswithahotpoker diatribe.

In many ways, this release continues the fine tradition established in the 3.0 EAP. An amusing, yet depressing attempt at cramming in features for users who have long since lost any form of plot they might have had some weak grasp of in yesteryears.

So where do we start? Well, xml editing is always a fun one. It doesn’t work. For some reason (despite being reassured by everyone that this IS supposed to work), my schema declaring descriptors wash their hands of their schemas, proclaiming themselves independent with astounding quantities of red liberally applied.

Of course, when xml editing does work, which does happen purely due to the laws of statistics, it’ll invariably be slow and painful, with the odd element always trying to make a name for itself by indenting itself in a manner than is entirely at odds with everything else.

Needless to say, this joy extends to ant files. Custom tasks have as much chance of being detected as James Strachan has of writing intelligible documentation.

Of course, if you thought xml editing was were all the fun and games are, then you should try editing jsp files, which is more or less guaranteed to have you rummaging about for the nearest pair of genitalia to gnaw off in sheer desperation. JSP editing in fact is so astoundingly broken, so thoroughly useless, that I have had to resort to mapping the jsp extention to be a plain text file. Every character you type will bring about the Circle of Doom (the annoying little red harbinger of badthings in the status bar that says something horrible has just happened). The fact that the CoD is a burning red distraction is insufficient, nono, we must also have a goddam popup with an ARROW pointing at it telling you that you have just met your doom. Wound, meet the fistful of salt you’ve been so eagerly anticipating.

Still, at least the java editing works, eh? Nope! Creating a pair of new braces with code inside them will invariably poo all over the indenting of the line following the last brace. Typing characters in a large (few thousand line) java source file is a leisurely activity where you can quite reasonably expect to call up some friends for a good old fashioned circlejerk, wait for them to show up, and indulge in a marathon session with said friends while waiting for the IDE to admit you’ve actually typed something.

The open API is, of course, yet to be blessed with a single line of javadoc. To be fair, it does make life more exciting; always trying to figure out what a particular piece of code will do. Which does bring about one of the surprisingly few useful features of the latest EAP; that you can very easily create a sandbox to run your plugins in with little to no effort.

To be fair, there are many small improvements here and there that improve the usability overall. The concept of javascript/css/html refactoring and a language aware editor is new and exciting, if the IDEA guys manage to pull it off. The level of language knowledge built into the editor far exceeds anything that exists currently (eclipse users, please go away quietly you worthless cheapskate turdburglars). Whether they can pull it off though and manage a usable release is another matter entirely.

I remain, as ever, a devoted and passionate IDEA user. The loathing I feel for the loud EAP users (gimme subversion or I will cry and soil my pants!) grows apace. I can barely stand to post on the EAP forums these days, such is my disgust and rage. This is, however, one of those rare cases where the rage is a manifestation of love and care. I can only hope (in vain, if history has anything to say about it) that the fine fine developers of this beautiful product rethink their approach and get back to thinking of their product as being exactly what they’d love to use, rather than what they think others would enjoy using.

On June 10th, bileblog’s second anniversary will come to pass. I thought it might be fun to rustle up some stats to celebrate the occasion:

It looks like the Java6 (or rather, Java SE 6 as the marketing gods will insist from now on) people have finally joined the moron parade that is the rest of the java community.

The particular idiocy that has resulted in wise men everywhere losing bowel control is the embedded javascript engine.

Why, in the name of all that is pink and fluffy in this world, does java need this? How many times have you bastards thought ‘god, I’d use java, if only it had a javascript engine that didn’t require that I download a jar’?

What’s even more incredible that this spastic idea is the reception it’s received. I’ve always been bitter about how retarded most java bloggers are, but the number of people who have happily drooled onto the ether about what a great idea this is (without ever, ever presenting a coherent or intelligible reason as to why) is flabbergasting. The idiocy of the masses is one thing, but to have so many individuals spontaneously display their genitalia all aquiver over such a pointless exercise is inexplicable, to put it mildly.

Even more astounding is the fact that the html engine in the JDK still can’t render anything more advanced than HTML 3, yet we have a bunch of filthy unemployed drama queens cooing about how great and important javascript support is.

The scripting host engine I can somewhat tolerate. After all, the scripting crowd is loud and obnoxious and easily appeased, so might as well toss them a bone (or two) to insert into the odd orifice (or two) to pacify them. No doubt, in typical JDK team manner, they’ll still work hard to mangle it up and not bother talking to anyone about how classloading actually works and demand all sorts of command line switches and sacrificing of children to the classloader pantheon.

The idiocy of course doesn’t stop there. We now have a ‘lightweight’ embedded http server. I suppose SE 7 will include tomcat eh? Maybe merge EE and SE, while we’re at it! Who needs something you can download in mere hours, when you can wait days for the joy of something you never even asked for in the first place!