Today's pattern is the 'Onion of Stupidity'.  This is a common pattern where you build up hack upon workaround upon compromise, inject a little shortsightedness and wind up seeing a good chunk of your effort goes into cleaning it up.  A colleague here promoted the term "technical debt" to describe issues were we these types of issues and help us prioritize them.  I'm thinking that my Onion is more about 'strategy debt'.  The onion is usually built with best intentions at all sides.

Peeling back the layers of stupidity is tedious and takes time, but cutting through it makes everyone in the room cry.

I'm sure we have all been here.  I had 2 instances of it today at work, and one with an old friend.  He wanted me to update some joomla modules and I said yes.  I go to ssh and wget the files and find out there is no ssh.  Without that I have to download the files, extract then and upload lots of little ones.  Then I find that some of the original files are edited so the have to be diffed.  Now I have to download the files and diff them.  Then I want to check but can't run it without the database.  I just restored my local ubuntu image and don't yet have MySQL. So I go to install MySQL and don't have connectivity yet between the VirtualBox and osx....

So the first layer of this Onion that I must peel is to fix Bridged Ethernet.  Or I cut the darn thing and move the site to a real hosting company.

So while I'm pretty much out of luck on my personal life here at my day job we all got together with a commitment to peel back our layers of issues as a team and focus on building out a solid foundation.  Hopefully the only onions we will have are the ones served on the sliders upstairs.....

I did the work in textmate but decided to spin up my new Netbeans 6.5 in order to test the subversion functionality.

Immediately I noticed that Netbeans picked up a tag mismatch and highlighted it nicely:

Netbeans showing off a tag mismatch

This was enough to impress me and I did a quick google to find netbeans other HTML / Front-end features.

It now has a nice CSS editor that is comparable to some of the tools I fondly remember from 5 years ago.  The preview and menu driven selectors are easy to work with.  I'd rather have a better code completion like Firebug, but this effort is great to see from a Java dev tool.

Netbeans CSS editor

Its a competitor to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, but based on the java developer created demos it just does not look complelling enough to matter.

Adobe had been making some great progress in the Flash virtual machine and the number of advances in Flash10 really impress the coder in me.  As a development manager I'm seeing Actionscript programmers reach an impressive level of maturity, with unit testing, automated builds and solid object design.

I'm interested enough in this to want to dig in more but no project in my queue comes to mind.  I'm only using Flash now for video players.

So for now I'm downloading this technology and looking for a problem.......

The individual aspects of a scaled web architecture are each so complex that it is easily a full time job for a person just to keep up in one area. I'm concerned about this because as we spend more time in individual areas we focus less time on the holistic approach. This is my same concern with modern medicine.

A friend and colleage went to a back surgeon and that doctor recommended surgery.  Why?  Because surgeons do surgery.  And they are so steeped in their practice that they elevate it above other options.  Before you generalize on greedy doctors let me tell you about an ops and dev at my shop that discussed for an hour how to handle a redirect.  Ops wanted to handle it at Akamai, and the UI Dev wanted to simply throw a redirect from the template.  When I told this to a middleware engineer he said they are both daft and it should be done in the spring controller.

All of these solutions are equally valid, and we can even model the ROI for each.  One of the invisible aspects was the maintainability, simply put I asked them which area is the least cluttered for with redirect rules. (At this point they all pointed away from each other - but that is the topic of another post

Perhaps this was an hour well spent, perhaps we should have spent 2minutes and moved on to the next ticket for the remaining 58 minutes.  But my point is that I'm seeing more evidence of the warrior giving way to the soldier.  It has been said that American companies excel due to our capacity to place a bureaucracy  to take the reins from early innovators.  I actually mean that as a complement, I'm impressed by the founders of Comcast (where I work).  Three early innovators build a solid foundation and had the forthought to entrust the growth to a different set of people.

This is a fitting concept here in Philadelphia where our founding fathers included such non-specialized geniuses such as Ben Franklin.  Our founding fathers innovated a new government and then handed it to the ultimate bureaucracy - the Federal Government.

In closing let me close this thought with the words of Heinlein, who said what I said - but with the expertise of a dedicated writer:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Credit to http://escapepod.org/2008/10/11/ep179-arties-arent-stupid/ for putting this thought into my head.

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