The BileBlog

Amazingly, I actually feel bad harpooning Geronimo. Jeff Genender seems like such a cool guy, suave and slick, and a good speaker. Sadly, he’s totally fucked by what he has to work with. Geronimo is such an frankenstein project that one can’t help but feel saddened and mildly disgusted with the whole thing.

We kick off with a show of the various piles of poo that compose Geronimo. This is when it’s pretty clear what an abysmal project this is. It’s a roll-call of projects with one thing in common; written by little boys who have just discovered the endless joys that pulling on a certain appendage can provide.

OpenEJB? Come on, you can’t build an appserver on a joke implementation. ActiveMQ being the fastest JMS provider? Blatant lie, just try running their own benchmarks against SwiftMQ. Axis? You’d be hard pressed to find a worse WS codebase.

Next we have some fairly feeble attempts at justifying Geronimo’s existence. For example, you can mix and match and build your own J2EE server! Hooray! Just what….NOBODY has wanted to do! You know, the fact that I can download an appserver, and know that it supports the connnector API even though I don’t currently needed is a GOOD thing. I’d have to be as stupid as a Geronimo little penistugger to want to rip out random bits. It’s really quite reminiscent of the sort of thing that all those oily spotty kids liked doing with their linux setups. Here’s a hint guys, people like you are such an insignificant drop in the ocean of EE users and customers, and until you start paying attention to REAL users not your own penis pumps, you’re better off taking yourselves out back and shooting yourself multiple times.

God, I really do feel awful. Jeff is just SO nice and sounds SO reasonable, it’s just that the stuff coming out of his mouth is such utter FILTH. The ‘What is Geronimo’ slide is obscene. I mean really, is having a maven repo THAT important when it comes to using an appserver?

We’re regaled with how Geronimo is a kernel. This seems to be the biggest selling point. It’s really amazing that these people think that anyone out in the Real World actually care about this.

Next follows a long tedious please-stab-me-in-the-eye-to-end-the-pain discussion of what a GBean is. Does anyone care? Will anyone EVER care? Do we really need more tedious penispenisesque xml files about how IoC works? As fucked up as the Spring people are, the Geronimo people are happily looking at current Spring as the state of the art and as something that must be bundled and emulated in every way. it makes me want to go out and buy a Baby Jesus buttplug and fling it angrily in Geronimo’s general direction.

Just to alleviate the boredom, we next have a ten minute tediumfest describing Geronimo’s…directory layout! First the high level one, then we drill down to the var directory, then we…ohgodmakeitstop.

The Geronimo XML files are yet another great illustration of how out of touch Geronimo developers are with reality and what people really want. The quest for a generic configuration mechanism means that you don’t configure the port for your website, you actually configure the port property of the appropriate gbean. It’s an important distinction here, where users are over and over again shafted by being forced to deal with things they couldn’t possibly care about. I can only imagine that Geronimo developers are so incredibly insecure that they feel the urge to highlight their own cleverness. Someone should tell these poor schmucks that in this day and age, there are far simpler and less environmentally devastating ways of getting laid.

Of course, unlike almost every other appserver in existence, you’re guaranteed to have to specify your own vendor specific web descriptor. Take that, ease of use fools! This is also unlikely to EVER be fixed, given how many random jars geronimo likes to ship with; so you’re always forced to specify class exclusions in the geronimo web.xml.

Of course, clustering is not really supported. If you really want to use Geronimo, you’re better off waiting for either a) Someone smart to take over and give the coding monkeys some direction, or b) Geronimo 2.0. Of course, neither is a guarantee of success, but if either happens, then there is a thin thin glimmer of hope in this dark and dismal landscape. EE 5? Haha, dream on. All we get is ’specs under way’, nevermind implementations.

The flaw with how Geronimo is marketed is perfectly embodied with this sort of talk. Instead of focussing on users and developers, the Geronimo people talk about how tasty their own shit is, in ways that are only relevant to each other.

it’s all awfully sad. Can you imagine how wonderful it’d be for us all to be able to round up a bunch of JBoss drones like Gavin Fleury and friends, and spit/defecate in their faces by pointing out how much better Geronimo is? It’s depressing what a pipe dream that is right now. It’s really perplexing how far behind JBoss Geronimo is. When will these people wake up and start caring about users, instead of the best configuration of buttplug/penis pump that’s required for maximum ejaculation distance?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.