Agility is one of the most abused terms in my profession.

Recent events in my day job have caused me to rethink what agility means.  We have a very elegant, loosely coupled system that allows us to build entire sections of our website in hours.  The framework handles everything from CDN integration to doing automated profiling every build.

Software engineers have to be good at identifying the bottleneck, and over the past few days I saw how the larger teams ability to react mattered much more then the codebase itself.

This is a topic I’ll have to explore after some rest

I thoroughly enjoyed the Iron Man movie. My son wanted more of a SpaceMarine clunky feel to the armor, but I though they nailed exactly how I saw Iron Man from my youth.

At least half the theater stayed past the credit roll, I was surprised by how many people knew about the extra bit.

It took some real willpower to sit through the endless list of names after consuming a super giant-sized soda and getting to a 2 hour movie 45min early

I just read an article in a java trade mag entitled: SpringSource CEO: “The Future of Enterprise Java is Clear and Bright”

The premise sounds positive.  Basically they took OSGI, Spring and threw it on Tomcat as a web server.  The idea of being able to deploy OSGI bundles with the bag of beans development style of Spring is really compelling.

What this negative post is about is how they still don’t get the ‘web’.  My biggest issue with Java web development is that not enough attention is paid to modern web basics.  The very first thing that I noticed on the SpringSource website was the 15 year old style url.

http://www.springsource.com/web/guest/home

what is with the /web/guest/home for the homepage?  That is really bad SEO mojo

The idea of bundles that you can drop in for added functionality is fantastic, but you hit an ugly query string laden url like:

http://www.springsource.com/repository/app/library/version/detail?name=org.apache.myfaces&version=1.2.2

as opposed to the far more buzzword complient library of plugins for something like django:

http://djangoplugables.com/projects/django-compress/

While the Java page shows you the really easy lines of Maven xml to paste into your pom, the python based django system talks about the usefulness of the actual bundle you are looking at.

And compare the old school search page of:

http://www.springsource.com/repository/app/search

to the happiness of a large input box with realtime results on:

http://djangoplugables.com/repositories/

At least this is better then the time I read the Jython website and was greeted by a ‘blink’ tag