http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/07/12/java_ee_burton_group/

Nah …

The whole stack is very complicated but most people only use about 15-20% of it (as with virtually every piece of software anyone’s ever bought I might add).

For example, hardly anyone uses EJB’s because it’s too complicated, there’s a movement in the industry to use Plain Old Java Objects for most things because of this.

Most people use the Web Application stuff because it’s easy to use and well understood (Servlets and JSP’s) and pretty easy to do big projects with if you’re disciplined.

Sun have produced a huge document that no-one will read apart from application server and tools vendors: meanwhile in the real world we’ll just get on with using the bits that are useful and ignoring the rest, as usual.

SOA – only the big corps are into this – it’s using sledgehammers to crack nuts for most of us. Again – big boy’s toys that they probably don’t need if they’re honest, but it looks good on the old CV.

I subscribe to a number of news letters about Java and Oracle and the people that run them seem to think that I want to listen to boring recordings of podcasts that were given by people who don’t understand the phrase Death by Powerpoint. There is a whole movement around this supposed content.

Podcasts are a poor, slow medium compared with the written word. I have lost count of how many times I have come out of an hours-long meeting to discover that the whole thing could be put on half a sheet of paper with a couple of bullet points. Why should podcasts be any different?

We have very powerful senses that can take in huge amounts of information very quickly if it is presented in a reasonably coherent way.

Don’t get me started on powerpoint – it’s a dangerous and poor medium for anything technical.

See here.

I’m a senior Oracle specialist who doesn’t live inside the M25 ring and it’s tough out there. Skills shortage? No, cheap new graduates shortage. Most of the senior-level work I see is either DBA or implementation of apps from Oracle or other ERP vendors.

I wouldn’t send my own kids into IT. It’s BORING. The fun stuff, programming, solving problems, making sure that you can truly meet needs, all that seems to be gone and have been replaced with a cheesy sweatshop mentality.

Also, sending jobs to India isn’t an issue. I work for a software house and we know we’re safe because the guys from Bangalore just don’t get the European cultural references. It isn’t cheaper to go there if everything has to be done twice – it costs a lot more in fact. I’m much more worried about places like Croatia and parts of the former Soviet Union where there isn’t the culture gap.

I also found the other comment here about higher productivity very funny – let’s move away from Oracle PL/SQL, Java and all the other sweatshop rubbish and start using some productive tools. Then it’ll happen. Longer hours? No thanks! That’s why kids are voting with their feet.

procedure dump_clob( c in out nocopy clob ) is
chunk_size integer := 254 ;
n_chunks integer := ceil( length© / chunk_size ) ;
begin
  for i in 0 .. n_chunks -1
  loop
    dbms_output.put_line(substr(c,i*chunk_size+1,chunk_size));
  end loop;
end;

I came across this brilliant article while reading about the big ball of mud design pattern. This design pattern is what you end up with if you don’t do any architecture and the system just grows. It’s not a design pattern so much as what happens when you just keep pushing to get something that works. It’s actually a very popular pattern. I found myself nodding all the way throught the article. I will not comment about what projects I’ve worked on which match these criteria!

http://www.laputan.org/gabriel/worse-is-better.html

It talks about why Lisp is in such a mess even though it has been finally standardised and is such an excellent language. Again very interesting. Higly recommended.

See here

You said “plug-ins such as Flash that allow graphics and drag-and-drop in the browser”

Been there with JavaScript and dynamic HTML forever, just a bit hard to do from scratch – but there are plenty of resources on the web. There’s also the whole chromeless thing (www.chromeless.org) for IE as well, which predates a lot of this allegedly new technology by four or five years. The only really new thing on the block is AJAX.

Personally I can’t stand Flash because it’s too hard (and expensive) and the documentation is rubbish. It claims to integrate with databases and XML but doesn’t say how. It’s a tool for graphic designers that forces the rest of us to care about their tiny fonts, and before ubiquitous broadband it made a lot of sites (where you just want the information, not the cleverness) unusable. It’s also impossible to spider and index sites properly.

Just my two cents

Quote from here

Consumers aren’t stupid. They know that the quality of content has been spiralling downward for years, and the price rising. You can’t blame piracy for everything. The truth is, what’s out there right now is crap. It’s an uncomfortable truth we all need to acknowledge, whether we agree with it or not – the perception is all that matters. Industry execs will dispute it until they are blue in the face, but only with other people in their industry, which speaks volumes. Content owners are wildly out of touch with their customers, and should expect to drift further as long as they continue to persecute them or rip them off with ever-rising prices.

How true – read the article, it’s very good.

See this

These comments are inflammatory and very cheeky. I’ve been using Oracle softare for nearly 20 years and it’s got worse not better in the last 5 or so.

Their original CRM (which must have had 1000 patches in less than 5 years too!) shipped with patches before you could even get it running.

The only thing they do that is’t a bugfest is the database, and even that (9.2.0.7 release 1, 10g release 1) had some unforgivable howlers in it.

Larry, fire this person and fire the one who insulted your  biggest European market after the US. Brits don’t respect authority, true, but that’s because we like to get things right and have documentation that was’t written by 8 year olds.

Got turned down for a job because I’m not technical enough!

Let me see

Wrote book on Unix shell programming. Currently planning white paper on Agile methods in an Oracle environment.

Last project involved 40k lines of PL/SQL and Java; re-architecting things to work using web servers and copying files directly into databases and out again onto the database server. Plus plugging into vast swathes of API’s written by my colleagues.

Using Oracle external tables, views to mask out data types, synthetic row types from those views, dynamic SQL to call the appropriate procedure using that rowtype, and a ruck of metadata plus a loading engine with a restartable three step workflow. Plus facilities to edit the data if it was incorrect. All done in dynamic SQL controlled from metadata. Plus background processing, plus creating batches of files to load one after the other over night. All from a tech spec which I wrote in the first place. Functional spec was written by someone else, I admit, but then I was busy at the time and did write the first couple of drafts.

Not technical my behind. Ridiculous! Suspect there was another reason, probably money or something equally cheesey.

Deep Joy.

I was listening to an item on today’s programme where one of the speakers said that the incidence of depression in women is far higher than in men. I remember reading somewhere that in fact the story is more complex than this throw-away statistic might lead you to believe. In communities where alcohol isn’t drunk (US baptists I beleive) the incidence of depression and related illnesses is about the same for both genders. It would appear that the social context allows the expression of the same tendencies by different means. In our wider society drinking and drink-related ills are where the men generally end up. I wonder if this would be a useful start for an item on your programme?