The BileBlog

For anyone following JavaBlogs, you’ve probably skimmed over a bunch of Sri Lankan shirtlifters cooing recently about a highly dodgy benchmark that somehow proves that Axis2 is faster than XFire. These turds are of course the same bunch of clowns who are very busy plopping their tagnuts all over the WS-* racket at Apache. The benchmark is by none other than WSO2; the company that effectively owns Axis2.

What’s interesting about this benchmark is that it manages to compare apples with oranges, and yet has its proponents drawing some truly perplexing conclusions.

There are some, ahem, issues with this benchmark. Like any vendor driven benchmark desperate to compete, It manages to compare wildly different things, just to find a case whereby they ‘win’. Instead of comparing the stacks fairly, they focussed on comparing the data binding parts. What they proved in fact is that ADB (a proprietary Axis2 data binding framework) is faster than JAXB (data binding specification). OK, not so surprising. If you wanted to be fair and picked the fastest data binding for XFire too, you could test Axis2/ADB against XFire/JiBX (JiBX being a frightfully fast OSS data binding framework). You’d see that XFire shoves a sharp pointy plunger in the general (or maybe even not general) vicinity of the WSO2’s development team’s collective asshole.

In fact, buried in the so called benchmark, you’d find the results themselves prove that XFire is faster than Axis2 when the comparison is fair and uses the same binding framework. Somehow though, this rather crucial fact is lost in the conclusions.

What’s more impressive is that no sooner than the company issues this highly dodgy report, its employees all start blogging about it and bragging that they finally managed to concoct a benchmark whereby they beat their competition.

Eran Chinthaka’s (whoever the fuck he is) blog has a particularly hilarious entry, with such gems as ‘We never did marketing for Axis2 telling bad things about other stacks’. Well my friend, I certainly am going to tell bad things about your stack, given your smug, snide, and ignorant post. The real icing though has to be ‘…then I feel Axis2 is even better than the numbers mentioned in the paper’. Huh? What, you, someone with a vested interest in your product, feel that the benchmark that you published and skewed to highlight your product, is not as biased as it should be? That reality, despite not even conforming to the distortion field imposed by your assumptions, somehow goes above and beyond it? I had no idea that the drugs available in Sri Lanka are so superior to those available to the rest of us.

This is of course, another ‘open source’ company. I thought that with JBoss being bought out and the old cabal being effectively neutered, we’d seen the end of the snide slimey comments by OSS against OSS, but our Sri Lankan friends seem keen to assume the throne of corporate fuckwittery in the name of OSS.

I hope this benchmark is taken as what it is, a company defending its own product against what is obviously a superior OSS solution. Friends don’t let friends use Axis2. Do you want to base your webservices infrastructure on a product from a company desperate to take your money, written as a student project, with a bunch of incompetent weasels at the helm trying very hard not to look like used car salesmen? Do you want something that integrates and embeds well withint your existing infrastructure, or do you want something that hijacks it instead?

Still, good thing we have the goodship Apache; that thriving haven of open communities, that final refuge for corporate flotsam and jetsam, that last bastion against whored solutions foisted on an unwilling and uninterested public, eh?

For some inexplicable reason, I’m one of the external reviewers for this year’s JavaOne EE and Web tracks. The one thing that’s utterly perplexing about it is the dire quality of some submissions.

Tempting as it might be, I’m not going to name names. I’m not going to point out how many vendors pitches there are, or how much they suck. Instead I’m going to try and understand what on earth some submitters were thinking.

For vendors, honestly, what were you thinking? Do you think the people reviewing these things are stupid? Do you really think that JavaOne attendees love to hear about how you solved problem X using your own technology, that nobody can actually use without dropping trow, bending over, and paying for the privilege of being molestered?

The open source crap is just as bad. Here’s a hint to you budding open source wankstains. If your project doesn’t have a community, has no buzz around it, and is not particularly innovative, then don’t bother. JavaOne isn’t some whore you can throw your dirty papers at for a quick show and tell. Nor is it a venue for you to idly gaze into your navel and pick out lint in public, musing on its quantity, quality, and what possible use it might have.

Of course, some of the submitters are savvy to this culling process, and it’s obvious that they’re working hard to try and make the proposal not sound like a product pitch. Unluckily for you though, the reviewers actually do know what’s going on in Javaland, and all of them have attended other conferences and know who has talked about what, and how successfully. So be careful, one misplaced vendor pitch could ruin your chances at playing with the big boys.

I don’t understand how hard it can be to put yourself in the shoes of the average attendee. The goal of this conference (and ANY good conference) is to help said user, NOT to help the vendor or presenter. The fact that you get to strut your stuff and waggle your genitalia at a few hundred people at a time is its own reward.

So given that the average reader here is a discerning (if somewhat mentally unfit) Java type person, with one finger on the pulse of the community, and another firmly in an orifice, I’d like to you know what you think. What would make a good talk? What talks have you gone to that sucked so much you wanted to shove Gavin Fleury, 3 TDD zealots, and a Websphere consultant into a blender and smear yourself with the resulting goop while making sweet manlove to Howard Lewis Ship’s beard?

On and before I forget, HAHAHA VIRTUAS IS OUT OF BUSINESS!!!! TOLD YOU SO!