Musings of a Trained Monkey

Things have been busy on the work side of my activities lately. Work is currently revolving around Java and using Spring MVC. Since I have primarily focused on Ruby and Rails information on my blog, I've been reluctant to blog about where my head is at in the Java space. If someone is interested, leave a comment and I'll see what I can come up with.

Which isn't to say I am not tracking recent developments in the Rails community, just that I haven't had time to analyze their impact and vomit forth a blog entry or two :-)

Okay, one little morsel of my experience with Spring relates to one of the core tenets of Rails: "Convention over configuration".
It finally found a way into a Java web development framework!

Like great art, this post by Darren Hobbs will long be remembered as the one that described Java in a way that most anyone can appreciate :-)

Also if you already have any programming experience with Java it will make milk shoot out of your nose, even if you aren't currently drinking milk!

If you’ve experienced the Enterprise SOA push from vendors at the large company you work for, there is some seriously funny reading to be had over at Patrick Logan’s website. I read them out of order having neglected Patrick’s feed for far too long.

Anyway start with Bad Idea, It keeps on raining… and finish off with This is Enterprise Stuff Look Out. Patrick makes a quote worthy quote in the last one:

Yes, why list actual reasons why XSD is good when you can just claim the top of the hill and dare people to knock you off. I think you might fall down on your own.

Having worked with SOAP/WSDL/UDDI/SOA J2EE shops and the “fun” that could be had by implementing different vendors tool frameworks because of the supposed possibility to interoperate. .NOT’s doesn’t play very nice with Java’s All of these radical redeisgn projects are overhauling either Mainframe systems that continue to shove data down the wire as they have for decades. By cobbling together a standards based “confederation” of servers running the latest OS’s with more memory and better IO times to large SANs, and yet even with it all set up, the Mainframe often remains the core piece because no one knew that it did “XYZ” and we didn’t buy the right software from a Vendor for this situation.

Manager’s begin to go bald as costs exceed even the most out there cost projections for the project. Vendor Consultants are hired to come in and clean up the implementation. The begin by dissecting it and do design documentation. This design/discovery/recovery period goes on for awhile… Until finally, the Bald Manager, with only his eyebrows intact, cancels the project!

Too bad no one at the company would adopt a new way of doing things or even admit that SOAP/WS**/SOA stuff is really just an attempt to ressurect CORBA. Don’t get me wrong the Vendor’s dolled CORBA up with some XML implants and tightened up some of the old source code wrinkles. Made quite the sales pitch for the new *Sexy cO*rbA* and managers all across the globe fell for it again.

Thanks for letting me drink from the well of truth you have over there Patrick I won’t be neglecting your feed any longer.