The BileBlog

It’s really quite surprising how boring Spring is. It’s a bad sign that the only potential amusement to be found is the thught of Rod ripping open his well buttoned shirt, calming and quietly taking one of his manboob nipples between thumb and forefinger, then squeezing hard and squirting the first row of attendees with his milky, rich, frothy, nutritious springmanjuice.

The talk consists of much patting of oneself on the back. There’s even a Bush moment, whereby Rod points out that ‘He cannot recount of any cases of major issues with Spring’s initial design’.

There’s also a lot of guff about the webby bits of Spring, which apparently are gaining portlet support and much enhancements across the board. Anyone still awake? Is there anything more boring that yet another web framework?

On the plus side, there are plenty of people around who for one reason or another, appear to have been literally bored to unconsciousness. There are a couple of guys close by who despite Penis Penis’ droning on and on, have managed to achieve a blissful state of sleep.

To be fair, the new xml configuration does seem to be an improvement over the current omgwtfbbq approach. Granted, a worse xml format is not technically possible given the constraints of space and time that we all labour under, but still. Rod and his crew of hungry breastfed minions seem to have finally figured out that using attributes in xml for primitives is a good thing. The extension stuff is actually rather neat, much as it pains me to admit.

There’s also a huge blurb about AOP enhancements. Honestly, is anyone still using that stuff? Aspects are so 2004, the world has moved on, why hasn’t Spring? Even Fleury is now fleeing like only a Frenchman can from his ludicrous ‘AO’ crapulence. I realise than now that Adrian Coyler works for Roddy, Spring needs to nod in AOP’s general direction a bit more furiously. Really though, it’s just making you all look bad.

Conspicuously missing from all this new guff is much mention of annotations. The spring folks seem to have become a victim of their own success, in many ways. They’re stuck attacking the pain points of J2EE 1.4, over and over again. A lot of this work is going to start looking awfully redundant once EE 5 becomes more entrenched. The world around them is moving on, but they’re so fixated on their own finger-up-the-butt-while-tugging-on-genitalia approach that they’re missing the pretty big changes that are happening around them.

What makes this particularly easy is that Spring has enough momentum that they can sort of be as ignorant, stupid, and twatty as jboss. They can choose to surround themselves with people who have already partaken of their drugs, and who will spastically chant along on cue.

Still, all is not lost. Rod is actually a pretty smart guy, as is Juergen. Certainly, they defecate from a great height in terms of pragmatism and religion-free approach on any counterparts they might have in jbossland. So really, there’s a good chance that they’re aware of all this, and are just biding their time.

Oh and for those of you wondering about the title, it’s to be sung to the tune of the Spam Song from Monty Python.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 6:33 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.