Tuesday May 18, 2004

But it's still funny to see it captured in a snapshot. Wondering what he's thinking about, "Maybe if virii were written with a portability layer, these suckers would get infected too... hrm" ( May 18 2004, 03:36:35 PM PDT ) Permalink


Keep It Real, JBoss The blogosphere is abuzz with the apparent exposure of the JBoss groups' shadowy marketing tactics. Are they really skulking around pretending to be a fan base when in fact they were posting about themselves?

The signal to noise ratio on TheServerSide's Forum have never kept me glued to the conversations but they recently outed users who share locations, which hopefully, by reducing anonymity, will raise the signal level a bit. Though recently enriched with a $10M investment from Intel, the JBoss group may have to spend some of the funds earmarked for engineering on PR instead. There's certainly no shortage of bile being offered for one of the most ambitious open source J2EE code bases, is there? "Anonymous Fakers!" declares Mike Spille. Lots of downloads evidently doesn't translate into lots of love.

Is this a redux of the fraudulent reviews on Amazon thing?

I'm wondering now if the comment-throughput on all of these blogs hosted on jroller.com have crashed their server; those blogs were inaccessible for a while today. Ya know, JBoss can run embed Tomcat as its web container (the server identifier says "Apache-Coyote/1.1" which in all likelihood is Tomcat). Hah, maybe they're running on JBoss!

OK, probably not. But nothing is shocking, is it? ( May 18 2004, 03:20:33 PM PDT ) Permalink
Comments [1]

Sunday May 16, 2004

There are tons of books from all of the usual suspects (O'Reilly, Wiley, SAMS, etc) about how to program with PHP but leveraging its crude support for OOP and employing best practices around that is seems to be pretty thin in all of the literature I've reviewed. The discussion I've seen on the web about object oriented PHP have also seemed weak; the commenter's who snivel about how complex OOP with PHP is underscore how toyish the use of PHP seems to be in many projects.

Before sending mail or posting comments insulting me for not appreciating PHP's simplicity, make sure you tell your Perl programming friends as well. I've been an adherent to OO in Perl for a number of years (though admittedly fell out of practice while my work was J2EE based) -- my gripes about prevelant practices amongst Perl programmers would be similar the above critique of PHP. In Perl, if you have a big blob of data and you want to find out what the heck is in it, you pretty much have to rely on Data::Dumper or, in PHP, print_r and then pick-apart the output to suss the structure that was created. Perl's man pages have several entries about lists of lists and and a data structure cookbook and so forth but the value of defining objects that provide a structural representation of the data (and of course, semantics) are too often overlooked in real software projects. If the changes I'm currently working on implementing had been using an instance of a class, I'd be looking at the object interface and making changes to the method calls. Instead, I'm looking at a big tangle of opaque data structures.

I could go on and on about how must PHP literature closely binds business logic and UI logic and the hideous morass that that creates, but I guess I already griped about that sufficiently in my high level rant about J2EE versus PHP. <sigh>

The code base I'm currently working on has a long way to go before the business data is captured in clear class definitions and there's a greater level of transparency into the relationships of the things within the application, but we'll get there. ( May 16 2004, 09:46:10 AM PDT ) Permalink