JavaOne BEA Keynote http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=javaone_bea_keynote
Having managed to blag my way into sitting on the second row during the BEA keynote, and having subsequently borrowed a BEA laptop to bile on, I almost feel bad for doing this. Still, it must be done, life can be so cruel sometimes.
First we have Bill Roth (BEA VP type dude), who starts off with debunking a lot of the shit that spotty little open sores sycophants have been spooging about in the last year or so. You know the usual crud, opensores will 0wn j00, java is cobol, ruby will make your penis big and tasty to hot little teenagers of the girl variety, and so on and so forth.
Patrick Linskey goes up on stage next, I don't know if he has makeup or not, but his pate looks awfully shiny, so it's a bit hard to focus. Regardless, the talk starts off with a rather boring 'middleware is great, we love middleware, middleware is prevalent, middleware lets you write applications, middleware gives you the flexibility to be flexibly flexible, you can embrace change, have sex with it, then surprise it with a hot lunch/cold karl combo.
The next issue to address is whether middleware has been commoditised. Unsurprisingly, the BEA answer is a fairly resounding 'nooooo' waily sound. All is forgiven though since Patrick just said 'holistic' and you really can't go wrong with that word.
Bill takes over again, with a great jibe at how stupid IBM is. It's really hard to agree, one would be hard pressed to find a company that manages to produce as much shit as IBM. Never, ever forget or forgive the crime of java.util.Calendar for which they are responsible.
The one piece of great news is that Spring now supports the non-JPA bits of EJB 3.0 (DI, session/message beans). The best part, of course, is that JBoss now has it stuck to them up the bottom with a sharp splintery thingybobby. There's absolutely no reason to use it now if you care about EJB. You can use kodo with spring, and have full EJB 3.0 support, running in tomcat if you want. Unless of course, for reasons that are entirely inexplicable, you enjoy chewing off your arm, cramming it up your ass, while singing twinkle twinkle little star in a strained and fairly uncomfortable voice. No doubt the Geronimo people will find this very useful (the spring thing, not the arm-in-anus thing), given that the only hope that poor little project ever has of not being a laughing stock is to beg for charitable donations from other entities that can actually deliver software.
Surprise surprise, it also turns out that SOA is NOT 'the' next big thing, but merely 'A' next big thing. I'm sure that by next year, we'll have an ever more sheepish nod in the general direction of this obscene cloudfest.
Patrick however lost me at his praise of Apache. He seems like such a sane normal guy, and here we have a blatant nod in the general direction of Apache. Someone must have given him the wrong suppository to make him say such horrible things, come on, of all people, surely he'd know that Apache does NOT have 'cool software'?
The real problem I have with this talk though is that the general theme is, unsurprisingly, bullshitty. They basically decided to use 'blend' instead of 'integrate', and are somehow pimping this as some kind of astounding revelation. Gosh, thank god I attended, I'd never have ever figured out that I should be using the right language for the right task, or that I should pick the right tool for the issue at hand. Now that I can 'blend' stuff, I'm sure my productivity will skyrocket! Pffft.
No pimpage is complete these days without some kind of IDE arm flailing with a promise that this could be almost as gratifying as self-asphyxiation. In this case, it happens to be BEA workshop. They're also doing something some Google AJAX talk I went earlier did; having one guy casually ask the other various leading questions 'so for example, if you change a dependency, it'll show up right away, right?' 'why yes, funny you should ask, but it will show up right away!' 'Great!' 'Great!' 'Wanna cyber?' 'Funny you should ask, but yeah!'
Still, despite all that, one can't deny that having another open source ejb3 provider is a great thing, and being able to run the whole thing standalone via Spring is enough to shake the limpest penis.
UPDATE: I've gotten way too many questions about these during the last few hours, so for the uninitiated, here are some definitions:
Hot lunch: the act of shitting in clingfilm stretched over someones open mouth then fucking the mouth and at the point of ejaculation bursting through the clingfilm giving the recipiant a mouthful of shit and spunk, not to be confused with a hot buffet (the act of shitting, pissing and vomiting on your partners chest.)
Cold karl: The act of defecating on a glass table, while another person's face is directly below the table/feces. Similar to the hot karl (form of assault in which the assailant procedes to fill a tube sock with his own faeces, ready to engage in fierce guerrilla warfare) and the warm karl (The act of defecating on another's forehead with only a piece of cling wrap separating the feces from the forehead).