Unfortunately, part of the system required a servlet to handle http requests (using http as an RPC mechanism). I’ve used Jetty in the past with good results so I downloaded it. Despite the existence of a “plugin” for IDEA to work with it, the debugger never worked.

So I moved on to Tomcat. I finally got IDEA configured to use Tomcat, the debugger worked, but the servlet was ignored every time without any kind of error message being logged. Did it fail to link or something (it used a lot of external libs I had to bring in). No clue. I simplified the servlet to just printing “Hi there” and still it refused to load.

This resulted in a refamiliarization with web.xml files and all the rest of it. In disgust I switched back to Jetty. Jetty at least logged the errors to the console and I fixed all the link issues, but still no debug. Back to Tomcat but it still wouldn’t load my servlet at the url I wanted. Eventually, I found the invoker servlet settings, turned that on, and the servlet began to work.

The bottom line is that the entire J2EE architecture, the servlet containers, the zillion xml files specifying garbage I never want to change anyhow, all of it is MUCH TOO FRIGGIN COMPLICATED FOR WHAT IT DOES. Too many descriptors. Too much config. Too much cargo cult xml.

Compare to PHP where I just drop a file in a folder under document root and I’m good to go. Or rails, which is pretty much the same deal – just putting the file in the folder ought to be all that’s required to make the thing work.

I think this will be my last foray into Java hell. At least for a few years until I forget how stupid it all is again.

I have a project coming up that would probably be a great Seaside candidate. The database has to be postgresql (according to the client). There is a native cocoa component – I’ll probably give BaseTen a try. For the web component, the obvious candidates are Rails (although I don’t know the state of Rails with PG – only mysql), and Seaside/Glorp – but I need to use Glorp to work like Active Record since the DB will be the master source of record for the schema.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like Glorp’s ActiveRecord on Squeak is ready for prime time, I might have to kind of finish that implementation.

I’ve just deployed my first soup to nuts rails application. Well, nearly. It certainly starts fast. Generate ActiveRecord classes for your tables using scripts and you’re off and doing basic CRUD.

However, its the little things that made the experience less than satisfactory. First – the changes in behavior moving from development to deployment were nerve wracking. I have rails running under apache on my laptop, no problem. On my production server, I cannot get byte one to come out of rails. Webrick works fine. Mongrel works. Rails cgi produces no errors, and no output. Even apache logs are totally silent. I don’t get it. For now it is running under mongrel – but I’ll have to put that behind apache and front it using modproxy. Irritating as hell.

Second, I set up memcachedкомпютри втора употреба on the advice of friends and was going to use it for my session cache. But it turns out that objects don’t get saved in the memcached – apparently you can only store plist kinds of structures. Objects get dropped. I spent several hours beating my head against this using the usual hammer for this nail – require_dependency. However, after listing every blessed model class as a dependency, it was still dropping a collection of objects. Back to the file based session cache.

Another thing that drove me nuts is all the magic values you can’t use for attribute names. I inherited this database and admittedly a bunch of columns and tables are stupidly named – however I kept running into problems with collisions with ActiveRecord extensions.

Another thing – camel vs underbar lowercase. You generally specify relationships as lower case names, that ActiveRecord uses to infer a class name. For instance, you specify the relationship as purchase_order and it figures you have a class PurchaseOrder that keeps its data in a table called purchase_orders with a foreign key purchase_order_id. This can all be overridden, but understanding which form to use where got pretty trying.

Reciprocal relationships – at some level of circularity, ActiveRecord falls over with stack level too deep on save. It isn’t even a very complex graph that does it in. It became necessary to remove a bunch of back references to get a save to work properly.

Overall, I’d say towards the end I spent more time debugging magic gone awry than I did building application functionality. So I have to chalk it up as a real learning experience, but not one I’m looking to repeat anytime soon. The lack of decent debugging facilities was really crippling – especially coming from seaside. ActiveRecord is cool, but it isn’t trouble free. Doing basic inheritance was a huge exercise in wackiness I’m not eager to repeat. If I hadn’t had a big old mysql database to build on top of, I probably would have used seaside instead.

So enough slamming – its not all bad. One thing that helped a LOT was the discovery of ActiveScaffold AS is AMAZING! I was able to throw together a coherent admin interface with it very quickly – its customization options are very powerful, and in the end I think the back office app will be about 80% AS and 20% task oriented workflow. That’s brilliant. A data driven sensible ajax interface almost instantly. Very cool.

I may do more ruby apps, there are some seriously powerful go-fast kinds of technologies, but much of the time savings this go-round was lost to flukey behavior that changed from environment to environment, and really lame debugging tools.

Rails is definitely a very mixed bag.

dot notation vs non-dot notation. When to use which?

collection.select {| x | x > 5 }

vs

collection select {|x | x > 5}

they both seem to work. Also, use of parens around argument lists – also seems to be optional. Two different block definition syntaxes is also annoying.

Less syntax would be most welcome.

I mean, I can only learn so many frameworks at once. So here we go – working through Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails.

The application was said to be written in Java. I know Java – I don’t like it, but I know it. If its small, I could be persuaded to pick up the maintenance.

However, I got a source drop and I was totally appalled. First, it suffers from the usual Java framework-itus.

Its J2EE – so we got Jetty container. They used Hibernate – so we have generated Java code based on some XML schema files. There’s also a mysql database – which duplicates the information in the Hibernate XML schema files. It uses cocoon – cocoon make use of xml and xsl to define navigation and transformations. There is also reporting that uses xsl. Workflows use flow – more xml only they used the Javascript extension so the workflows are actually defined using server side javascript.

Got all that? We have Spring, Coccon, Flow for Javascript (flowscript), Hibernate, Jetty, Javascript, Html, CSS, SQL, XSL and god knows how many dozens of distinct flavors of XML. For a 25 page web app. Wait, did you notice I didn’t mention Java? There is Java – the Hibernate generated classes are used – but indirectly – they may as well not exist at all since all the application code is some fractured XML or Javascript fragment stashed who knows where.

It seems we’ve lost track of something here. “Locality of Reference” In general, all the stuff that deals with the product selection page ought to be visible by looking into the file representing that page, then maybe drilling into components. The problem here is that, everytime I have to drill down, I have to switch languages. And context switches are bad for programmer productivity – mKay?

I’ve turned down the job. I don’t have time to learn all that junk for this little app. The client needs a new installation – for 25 pages that do mostly CRUD to mysql. If I do it, I’m thinking plain old PHP with an ORM. If I can find an ORM for PHP.

So far I’ve looked at Doctrine (not yet ready for production but it looks cool), Propel – and some others. The really off-putting bit is their slavish insistence on creating the xml mapping file – just like Hibernate. Of course, I have an existing database. The XML file they want is in the db. It just isn’t XML. Still, all the information is available for query – so why are they bothering me with this junk? Read the damn schema and make me some classes. I’ll eliminate the many to many mappings by hand. Sheesh. No wonder there’s a software crisis.

Hey framework people, stop making me write monkey code – figure out how to eliminate extra work – not make it. One meta model is enough.

Google! Fix this stopbadware flagging nonsense!

They are totally unresponsive despite repeated requests for review. They don’t even mention what they object to – I’ve read their guidelines – I see no problems. As far as I can see – Google IS the badware.

Google boycott starts now. Because this is evil.

OTOH, the thing that really ticks me off is this little comment by Arrington.

…it costs exactly the same to produce one copy of the song (the first one) as 10 million copies. Simple economics takes over. Free.

Which, if true, implies that Microsoft ought to be giving away Vista, Office, and everything else. Because Music is Software. It costs as much to develop as software, it takes every bit as much time, talent, and skill.

Just because you can make a second copy for a buck, doesn’t mean that’s all it is worth. If it costs $30k to record a song (which is kind of typical these days), and we are expecting to sell 100 copies, then this song needs to make $300 per copy to break even. If its 10 copies, then its $3000 a copy. The same economics apply as software. Just like there is free software, shareware, and commercial software, there are many business models around music. No single model is right all of the time.

Arrington should stick to his little blog about the shiny things – he obviously knows fuck all about the economics of creation.

There is an interface to request removal from the blacklist, but while you can be blacklisted in seconds, it apparently takes several days to get off of the blacklist. Nice.

Death to Microsoft and the IE team.