The BileBlog

The last talk I went to today is Enterprise App Mashup: Architecting the Future by Eugene Ciurana.

Of course, the talk is as fluffy and pointless as I had expected. I walked in late because the likelihood of anything vaguely interesting being said was fairly negligible.

The one thing Eugene does excel at is name dropping. Whatever he did at walmart clearly involved next to no ‘real’ world, and a lot of musing and faffing about with whatever toys happened to catch his fancy. In many ways, it’s a dream job. Wouldn’t it be great to have a job where you get to fuck around with whatever you want, without ever having to achieve or deliver anything? Without naming names, there seems to be 2-3 jobs like this in this industry, held by vocal public personalities. Yet more proof that it’s a cruel unjust world.

The core problem with this talk is how nebulous it is. We get the usual ESB flagwaving, that same tired old diagram of a centralized bus and how we’re moving into a happy new world of no point to point, anyone and everyone plops their turdy nuggets onto the bus, who will magically and mysteriously only deliver it to other applications that want to gobble up said turdicles. The clever thing is that there still seems to be some people who haven’t tried this approach ,and still don’t know that if applications aren’t written to talk this common language, you end up writing a zillion adapters, thus having the same ball of spaghetti, except that you’re now also now beholden to a bunch of dubious shady people who now happen to own your centralised bus.

The ludicrous example we have is making two applications communicate, one of which talks JMS, and the other talks SOAP. Now, has anyone ever come across such a situation? Where they just happen to have message structure that’s similar enough so all you’d have to do is drop in an ESB and now the world is magically wired up?

It’s just so astoundingly stupid. One of the most impressive cases of the emperor having no clothes since SOA. Speaking of which, I went to the SOA panel which was equally depressing, services are pretty much….anything. It’s a testament to the power of salesmanship that anyone is able to actually sell this crap.

It’s very clear that Eugene spent a couple of days playing with Mule (ESB), and thought that he’d give them a shout out as some kind of benevolent godfather type at Walmart.

Even more ludicrous, he recommended that people use…JavaSpaces. Good lord, is it 1999 again? He even mentioned it as a sane alternative to JMS. Good thing everyone is going to ignore everything he’s saying, so no harm done I guess.

The talk title certainly didn’t disappoint, the talk is so full of shit, so pointless, so inapplicable to anyone that it’s impressive that a human being can actually stand up for an hour and make noises in vague sentence structure about it.

Gotta give the man credit though, he has nothing to say but delivers it with style and authority, it’s easy for people to end up thinking they’ve attended a good talk, because the speaker was friendly and engaging and spoke well. The fundamental flaw is that HE SAID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The talk basically revolved around how great the speaker is, how he’s bought expensive hardware because he’s so cool, how he knows so many people and vendors, and how some of them lined up for a glimpse of his holy genitalia.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.