Thinking inside a bigger box - Latest Comments in Drinking from the Java firehose: A manager’s primer to Java projects

Re: Drinking from the Java firehose: A manager’s primer to Java projects

Kukenspeil — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 14:25:53 -0000

J2EE was horrible from the start. It's a great example of what happens all too often in software development. Good solutions exist, someone ignores all the hard lessons learned making it and goes ahead and makes something new that is full of problems.

Look at CORBA - don't laugh yet - especially if you don't have any real experience with 2.x and POA. Sure, it had several problems, but look how J2EE basically took all that was bad from it, removed all the powerful extensibility, and everyone thought it was something brand new and "Incredible! Look how I can call remote methods!" Woo hoo. And then came SOAP, a horribly broken standard - SOAP had serious technical shortcomings, but, as a market strategy, it was a masterstroke. Again, people with no real understand of distributed systems working in areas they have no business doing.

It happens all the time. Something works. Then someone re-invents it without looking at the previous work and ends up with something that really could have been great, but turned out to be garbage in the end (and lots of disastorous projects based on it).

Re: Drinking from the Java firehose: A manager’s primer to Java projects

Johannes Brodwall — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 19:43:05 -0000

Alright, I hear you. I'll add a follow-up of this article to my backlog. But you guys better read it!

Re: Drinking from the Java firehose: A manager’s primer to Java projects

Geir Hedemark — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 06:38:42 -0000

Good article, Johannes. Keep up the good work.

I halfway agree with Øyvind. The article would be "complete" in a totally bogus aesthetic sense if it also tried to give pointers to what is happening today. There sure is enough to choose from: AOP, testing moving from unit testing to subsystem-style tests (?), the JCP dying, "developer" roles starting to become less technology oriented and more people-interaction oriented in some ways (and not in others, since there is such a bewildering amount of technologies and frameworks to keep up with) ...

Write it myself? Hum, I already have three projects that aren't moving.

Re: Drinking from the Java firehose: A manager’s primer to Java projects

Johannes Brodwall — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:08:25 -0000

Hi, Øyvind. Good point. Maybe suggestions for improvement could be a good subject for a new article. Maybe you could even write it. :-)

Re: Drinking from the Java firehose: A manager’s primer to Java projects

Øyvind Wergeland — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 05:04:25 -0000

A good historical perspective, Johannes, but I lack suggestions for improvement! It's really not sufficient to say that .Net is not any better. Some may even decide .Net is better, since it's completely controlled by one company.