Skip to content

Category Archives: rants

Stuff that is just plain wrong, part 1,893,567

Weblogic’s a big, vendor-supported, application server right? And it has advanced clustering features, right? So you’d think it’s clustered JMS implementation is one of the best in the business — after all large enterprise systems often require high capacity and reliable clustered messaging, right? And Weblogic is offered as a solution to those sorts of [...]

The Ordeal of Installing Oracle Service Bus on a Windows-based developer workstation

This is a genuine installation procedure which I wrote, but you might want to read it for its other values. Overview OSB installation in a development environment consists of a completely separate Weblogic instance and yet another ‘special installation’ of Eclipse. You can’t use existing Eclipse installations. Nor is it recommend to use one of [...]

Glassfish is doomed in the ‘department’

There’s been lots of discussion the past six months about the fate of MySQL under the ownership of Oracle. Now that the purchase of Sun is complete, I’m much more concerned about the fate of the excellent JEE platform Glassfish. For example some people think that superior technology will prove to Oracle that Glassfish is [...]

Mistakes you can make with SOA

Bob Lewis has a great column this month, “What if SOA is a mistake“? His penultimate paragraph asks: Lost in the shuffle is something basic: Programmer productivity. Friends who are hands-on with such matters tell me the available SOA development environments are less than half as productive as products like PowerBuilder and Delphi were, back [...]

American Express are enablers of security threats

Peter Newton, “Director of Marketing” at American Express Australia Limited ABN 92 108 952 085, really likes Russian Mafiosa. Or maybe it’s Chinese Triads, bikie gangs, or maybe some local spivs operating out of a small rented smash repair shop near Beenleigh. Perhaps all of the above. Look at this email I got in my [...]

Mail.app alternatives – Mailplane FTW!

Based on the post from the other day about Mozilla Thunderbird as an alternative to Apple’s Mail.app, I got a recommendation on the straight-talking java mailing from Joey Gibson to check out the commercial application Mailplane. After a day playing with it, I’ve now bought a license. Now Mailplane isn’t your average mail program – [...]

Mozilla Thunderbird as alternative to Mac Mail.app

This morning my Mac’s Mail.app actually ate two emails I wrote and didn’t send them or save them in my ‘Drafts’ folder. Data loss is unacceptable, so I searched for an alternative. It seems the best alternative on offer is Thunderbird, which I used to use in my Windows and Linux days. Thunderbird 2 doesn’t [...]

Agile is dead

I know that’s a pretty bold statement but here’s why. This morning I went to a vendor’s presentation morning, it was the usual game of buzzword bingo from the very first slide on. All the usual enterprise2.0, social-networking, portal-compliant, content-management, vertically-integrated, SOA-BPM-UCM-JEE-ESB-WS-BPEL platform-framework-enabling scalability-enhancing fun-lovin’ don’t write code but manage-the-enterprise-blog-wiki-twitter-facebook-youtube shopping cart drag-n-drop non-content that [...]

To do redux

I just want to answer the anonymous “process nazis” trackback on yesterday’s ‘//TODO’ Considered Harmful post, because that blog desn’t allow comments without a login. Quite apart from issues with Godwin’s Law (and that the writer has enumerated a bunch of rules that get “violated” then accuses other people of being process nazis), the post [...]

‘One throat to choke’

Many developers will have heard this term used as a justification for buying all, or most, of an organization’s IT infrastructure from a single vendor. And it is, like most of these idiotic aphorisms bandied around IT management, a complete crock of excrement. It’s the sort of thing that salesmen must tell credulous IT management [...]