I’m not. I think Java is withering on the branch under Sun’s stewardship. They no longer have the money of the dot.com days to keep up with dot.net and as a result Java is retreating into its J2EE ghetto. Sun has a bad record of releasing APIs then secretly dumping them. A couple of examples are the JMF which has not been touched in years and consequently is a half-baked out-of-date solution.

More recently they have dropped Windows support for the Java Comm package. This was done very sneakily to the end of 2005 with no announcement of their intention and in contravention of their end-of-lifecycle mission statement. Going back a bit in the dot.com days they launched a server toolkit that enabled the quick building of all kinds of servers - I built a POP3 and SMTP server - until Sun dropped it. I mention these examples as they are all areas where I have been inconvenienced by Sun’s cavalier approach to Java stewardship. If it was not for IBM and countless independent developers Java would be dead. I sometimes wonder whether Sun would rather the whole Java thing went away so they could get back to their real business of selling high priced servers to banks.

I would rather download 6 million petabytes of Oracle and DB2 instead of the JDK bundle.

You sorry … whatever…

They come up with a persistence mechanism and they ask us to dowload a JDK with a DB. These guys are Idiots. They had better be like you. The kind which asks people to downloAD SHIT FROM A 1000 DIFFERENT PLACES. Your ADD buddy (Gavin) is upset too..(this time coz he’s gotta code for yet another DB)

Anyway.

Now I will make a valuable contribution.

You know what’s odd ? What’s odd is this : in MS Excel, when you click a cell and then click Format\Cells, and then click the Alignment tab on that little widget thing, you’ll see that the little Horizontal dropdown doodad has ‘General’ displayed. Because it’s at the top of the list, which is how these dropdwons normally work.

But in the Vertical dropdown doodad, ‘Bottom’ is displayed … and SELECTED FOR YOU … even though it is somewhere in the middle of the list.

You actually have to scroll in the Vertical dropdown to select ‘Top’, which is odd … because that’s the selection all normal people make, as we know, and also because that isn’t how these dropdown doodads usually work.

And so that’s kind of a pain. But it got me thinking : why is ‘Bottom’ so special to MS ? Is this part of their ‘tittilate the developer’ philosophy ? Did the guy working on it have a fetish - or does the entire team have issues ? Why does the Text Control section have ‘Shrink to fit’ but not ‘Grow to fit’ ? Why do they have an ‘Orientation’ section but no way to select sexual preference ?

It’s all food for thought for the Wiggly One.

Thank you for your time.

So many idiots.

I’m pasting my code up again. Head on over to my blog and tell me what you think.

http://jroller.com/page/RickHigh?entry=ibatis_working_with_composite_objects

Scratch that - I don’t need to know what you think! Pasted code is the schiz!!!

Rick

This is simply a bold move to answer Oracle’s decent JEE 5.0 server, TopLink, a free Java IDE that’s half-decent, a JSF component library, and blah blah blah.

Go Derby! (or Cloudstink or whatever it is next month)

Don, keep your Cox in your pants.

Well, that’s one part. The more troubling is that later whedn someone wants to improve the web service or refactor the code, your web service and code are coupled. Now you’ve got to work something else out. And what happens when you want to publish this service using the next big buzzwordy technology (I know, this is crazy: Web Services are clearly the final and ultimate communication specification.) Good design would treat the WS as a view. There are a lot of good tools for publishind web services (and connecting them to Java) and Java code isn’t one of them.

“To be frank, I have this same view about most software that performs significant function. A lot of code is poorly thought out (which is bad, agreed). Web services don’t change that picture for me, though. Same problems.”

Yes, this is the same old story. X will solve all your problems with U. X will make your piss-stream more powerful. X is the ultimate solution. X will allow you to lay-off all your compentent (read expensive) technical people. [2 years later, same jackass] Y will solve all the problems created by the inherent flaws with X. Y will allow you to lay-off all the X experts you have had to hire in the last year.

“Now, having said that, after I HAVE done the careful planning and said the proper words and so forth, I want to deploy easily. There’s no business value in carefully planning and crafting repetitive infrastructure code. This looks like a step in that direction. Yah, it can be - and is being - misused and sold dishonestly.”

I don’t disagree with tools that create web service specs from code. They can save a lot of time because WSDLs are so arcane. But this is just boilerplate. It’s not the final deployment step. You should be looking at tools that are much more geared to XML and allow you to bind the Web service to Java code in a highly flexible manner.

“Beyond that, too, I think that this WS stuff has to BECOME easy … or at least a lot easier. The crap coming out of Sun as the JWSDK was terrible - really laughably primitive stuff. And it hurt the Java cause, because managers are always managers and want to see the quick fix. So I think … you have to be able to deal with the challenge from these people. It will never prevent technical pros from insisting on a high-quality approach - we fight that battle all the time.”

The problem I see so often is that aggresive people with questionable technical skills make themselves the technical leads in the work environment. They think these shortcuts are great and push them and blame others when they hae problems. The real management types don’t know how to reboot a computer and just believe everything these people say because they sound convincing.

“It would be good if we could deliver this message to business management. Software is going to get better and better - but it’s also going to get harder and harder to build it.”

Good luck. Business is convinced that software and developers are fungible commondities.

To be frank, I have this same view about most software that performs significant function. A lot of code is poorly thought out (which is bad, agreed). Web services don’t change that picture for me, though. Same problems.

Now, having said that, after I HAVE done the careful planning and said the proper words and so forth, I want to deploy easily. There’s no business value in carefully planning and crafting repetitive infrastructure code. This loos like a step in that direction. Yah, it can be - and is being - misused and sold dishonestly.

Beyond that, too, I think that this WS stuff has to BECOME easy … or at least a lot easier. The crap coming out of Sun as the JWSDK was terrible - really laughably primitive stuff. And it hurt the Java cause, because managers are always managers and want to see the quick fix. So I think … you have to be able to deal with the challenge from these people. It will never prevent technical pros from insisting on a high-quality approach - we fight that battle all the time.

But, yeah, I couldn’t agree with your last paragraph any more strongly than I do. This stuff is not easy, and it isn’t ever going to be easy, and it will in fact become more and more difficult as the world build more interconnections.

It would be good if we could deliver this message to business management. Software is going to get better and better - but it’s also going to get harder and harder to build it.

The whole point of a web service is to create an API that is completely independent of your underlying implementation. So first of all, defining your specification with some Java code is way off target.

But more deeply, you should be carefully crafting this API and descibing the requirements and expected behaviors. Once you’ve exposed this, you should not be changing these specs unless you want to break all the clients.

If you are just writing up some code and then clicking ‘expose’ (or whatever) you are doing all this in an ad hoc and thoughtless manner. I’ve worked with Web Services designed this way. They aren’t even on the internet, they are internal to the organization and they are complete garbage. An absolute waste of time and money.

When are people going to wake up and realize this shit isn’t easy? It takes half a brain and some work to do things right. You can’t just fart out a Web Service. MS already farted out SOAP. Too much gas.

Why do you say this ? (Assuming that I want to make my services available over the Internet, this is ?)

Kind of a mixed bag of good and laughable features … but the good are worth a lot to me.

OK, now … good direction with WS … next time, DON’T take three years to catch up with Microsoft … things are looking up.”

You should be laughing at them. Anyone who is specifying web services with Java (or C# or VB) code should be fired on the spot. If you think web services are a good way to expose your Java messages you are missing the whole point of webservices and SOA and all of that buzzword crap.

http://www.sleepycat.com/products/bdbje.html

What are Sun afraid of here?

I am a log4j developer and although it’s top secret, we are planning to bundle Derby and MySQL into log4j. Our reasoning is simple:
- We want to give an integrated experience to our user base and provide a loggable out-of-the box database, so you don’t have to go through the hassle of configuring our SQL appender
- We want to give our developers a choice and not lock them into Derby (we are pro-choice)
- We want to be a step ahead of Sun because we are open source and open source rulz!!

While I write this, our build scripts are running to provide all you developers we love and cherish and adore for loving us a new and improved and better and sexier way of logging in your applications.

Log n’roll
the log4j team

Kind of a mixed bag of good and laughable features … but the good are worth a lot to me.

OK, now … good direction with WS … next time, DON’T take three years to catch up with Microsoft … things are looking up.

Thanx to Jimmy James and the whole News Radio crew.

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/Desktop/mustang/beta2.html

The tone of the page gives an idea of what’s going wrong at Sun. This guy is the lead.

Here’s his link on the the new webservice annotation.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/dannycoward/20060227

Great. Now, why would anyone want that?