The BileBlog

Due to some freak accident, I find myself at the last day or two of ApacheCon. I’m actually here for JCP reasons, but I figured I might as well find a few talks to point and laugh at.

So the first disaster I stumble into is Craig Mcflaflaweewomjibberploppy’s Shale talk. I walked in halfway during this talk, and probably unsurprisingly, the demo being shown looked like it had escaped from 1998. The demo was shale validation, and how it can be server or client side. The client side validation was shown using, wait for it…ALERT boxes. Craigy clearly cares nothing for web 2.0, web 1.1, or web 1.0.

Craigy then goes on to talk about tiles. It’s so hard to take this stuff seriously. Does anyone actually use tiles? Even delta.com runs sitemesh. The tiles stuff is the usual horrific sprawl of xml, and Craig is his endearing incoherent self.

I haven’t been to any other talks, so maybe this is par for the course for apachecon, but the screens are absolutely abysmal. Craig is showing his IDE< and the text is so blurry and vague that I can't even figure out what IDE he's using. He keeps saying how clever it all is and gesturing wildly in the general direction of what I think is some xml, but of course, the poor audience sees nothing at all beyond some blurry gibberish.

Next up we see some tapestry inspired crud, with the idea of writing html pages and plopping an array of jsfid attributes for the dynamic poop. The demo involves changing the colour of error messages. I feel pretty bad for Craig, as this demo is a great example of why everything he ever writes is so astoundingly unusable. The process goes something like this: find the right id for your element, go to some xml file, find the right item, go to the error messages, find the class, go to the style, REDEPLOY the app, then see your colour change! Of course, Craig realises how much work this is, so happily points out that it wouldn’t be possible without open source. Most perplexing.

Craig’s guiding principles seem to be COD; confuse, obfuscate, and disempower. The more levels of indirection you have, the better your framework. Users that call the framework apparently find that confusing, scary, and pants-filling. He thinks users would rather have frameworks call user code. Every API that this man has ever produced adheres to these principles. The six people in the world who know better look on incredulously, as both Apache and Sun allow this smut to propagate and pollute our beloved java landscape.

At least there are some smart people in the audience, I can see at least 3 people who look very asleep, and I think one of them is a fat man who is about to start snoring, and some guy just stormed off in disgust.

Clearly I’m not the target audience for this talk. The thoughts I’m left with after attending this talk boil down neatly into: wtf is shale’s relationship to struts and/or webwork?

If there’s one thing a time machine would come handy for right about now, it’d be to go back and stab Tim FuckFace O’Reilly with sufficient vigour and zest to prevent the calamity that is the web 2.0 buzzword.

Maybe it isn’t surprising, after all, It’s been proven time and time again that I’m in the tiny minority of people in blogwankland that remains skeptical, reality based, and decidedly anti-danglyshinyobject. Of course, I’m comforted by the fact that the silent majority is likely also on my team, and that our tech landscape has thoroughly earned the abysmally low expectations the world has of it due to the shiny object brigade.

So what’s so bad about Web 2.0? Well, it’s such an astoundingly meaningless term. If you speak to anyone advocating this pile of fetid excreta, you’ll find them launching into disturbing contortions and obscene limb flailing in a pathetic attempt at coherently tying together a number of unrelated topics. If you really need a visual, picture a group of adults with severe Downe’s Syndrome attempting to twitch in time to some death metal. Their fat limbs jutting angrily, bereft of any centralised control mechanism. Their slack jawed faces staring blankly at horrors only they can see, drooling foolishly in the forlorn and impossibly distant hope of a brighter happier world.

Yes web 2.0 people, that’s you. Why, you probably wonder, given your collectively pitiful mental acumen. I’ll tell you, it’s because your desperate need to gawp at everything and anything in front of you is downright offensive to humanity. Maybe some examples will help illustrate the point.

AJAX. It’s amazing how many people think that AJAX is pixie dust. I’ve lost count of the horrific usability of 80% of the shit that ajaxian.com spooges over, for example. Granted, that site isn’t really to be taken seriously for anything more than its grinning idiot approach (count the smileys, if you don’t believe me). It is however an accurate reflection of the AJAX mentality.

Dion Hinchcliffe in fact, quite unintentionally, beautifully captures what it is that makes Web 2.0 twats so worthy of a bit of friendly hooded-crucified-with-electrodes-on-genitalia-while-standing-on-some-sort-of-box action. Apparently he thinks that ‘Web 2.0 represents best practices’. Ohyeah? If these best practices are so obvious, why are there more AJAX frameworks now than java web frameworks? Why is it that every single AJAXified app behaves in bizarre and unintuitive ways, on the rare chance that it actually works on more than one browser? Why is it that whenever the AJAX behaviour is not subtle or in the background, users feel confused, sad, and start crying like little girls? Why are all the lemmings desperately trying to find design patterns and a method to the madness?

Dion’s ‘Quality is maximised, waste is minimised’ assertion is breathtaking in its naive audacity. The fact that he cited 37signals is testament enough to how divorced he is from reality. I know of 5 people who have tried 37signal’s basecamp. None of these are techies, and every single one of them had an awful experience, and spends their time telling anyone who’d listen that it is, without a doubt, the worst project management tool they’ve ever encountered. The ’simpler means higher quality’ line is also ludicrous. Simpler for who? Simpler to code has nothing to do with simpler for the user.

All Web 2.0 chozgobblers think that all they have to do is be Googly and their problems will dissapear. Sure, it’d be great if we could all churn out toys like google, an endless parade of what happens when you have too much money, too much time, and few revenue streams. Just never forget that what makes all those toys feasible has nothing to do with Web 2.0; it’s boring old AdWords and AdSense.

There’s no doubt that ajax, tagging, semantic fappery and all that other gibberish have some potential. Ultimately though, there is no revolution, nor even an evolution. It’s simply the ability to toss in a few more tools in the toolbox. Specialised tools, that can be effective when used against the right obstacle. Nothing more, nothing less.