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Software Fashion
fedor writes "Software fashions come and go, but they always claim a few victims on the way. Where there's fashion, you'll find that rather weak willed person who is the Stupid Fashion Victim (or the SFV for short).
This great article from Software Reality is all about fashion in software. Do you all remember WAP? In a couple of years some of the current 'technologies' will be gone too. The article mentions VB.NET, struts and XP as current fashion..."
Actually, I always suspect an idea is bad when Sun Microsystems has an entire Java-One conference based on it.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
But missed CORBA! Surely it belongs in the Technology X != Silver Bullet category. As far as I'm concerned, CORBA best solves the "this project has too many resources" problem.
But then again, I'm probably just another SFV :-)
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
Technology X = Money/Success/Silver Bullet
Illegal division by zero at line 1.
Richard Dawkins in his book "The selfish gene" introduced a concept of a meme. Meme is a replicator, just like gene, except that it represents an idea. It is copied by us, humans, either verbally or in writing, software, paintings, etc., and so on. Susan Blackmore in her book "The meme machine" expands on the idea.
Now, what does it have to with "Software Fashions". Both Dawkins and Blackmore present well-thought out argument that memes are subject to similar forces as genes. As a consequence, just like in a genetic world you can have outbreaks of viruses, in memetic environment there are outbursts of ideas. Some of them are as much use as a flu virus, and until our minds develop resistance to it, they will spread. Once memetic vaccine has been developed they die out.
Blaming software fashions on SFV is just like blaming flu outbreak on a SVV (stupid virus victim). Note that memetic fashions are common and not restricted to software. From bell-bottoms, through furbies to whatever the latest craze we have now.
A religious war is an adult version of a fight over who has the best imaginary friend
From the article:
That alone should tell you that the author has no clue as to what they are talking about. I am most definately not a VB.NET fan, but that statement is just false and shows a huge lack of understanding of the .NET Framework.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
The savvy love WAP. I monitor every network I manage with it, created WAP-based listing searches for one of my real estate clients, and wrote a system to put our local newspaper's stories into WML. The users who know this don't hesitate to pay Nextel $10 a month more to get it.
There's lots of useful content that can fit within WAPs limitations, and it's a snap to do. I blame the low acceptance on content creators who are not taking the tiny bit of time needed to make WML versions of their sites.
Until the content is there, it can't become very popular in the mainstream.
Promote civility: mod down any post starting with 'ummm'.
The biggest stupid software fashion is IT outsourcing--it has reached the point where every corporate middle manager feels they have to have a story on how they're outsourcing, long before (if ever) outsourcing has proven any reliable ROI.
Unfortunately, unlike other stupid fads applied to software such as TQM, ISO9000, RUP, etc., outsourcing does real economic damage to the victims, (as opposed to just the psychological damage represented by trying to work around the others).
Remain calm! All is well!
The Struts tag libraries are incredibly useful for any kind of html form based web app (aka. all of them). Remembering what the user last selected on a form takes a ton of horrible looking code if done with pure jsp or old school servlet/jsp model 2. Struts is also useful for automatically filling out your java bean with data from the http request, validating it according to your rules and sending it back to the input page if there are errors or processing it if there are not.
I will definitely agree that the learning curve for struts is quite steep and the number of files involved per user action is high (1 form bean, 1 action, 1 jsp, 1 xml config file, 1 property file, possibly 1 xml validation file) but there are some IDEs which help out in some cases. The problems are incredibly similar to most MVC frameworks. Using modular design leads to more complex code, its a fact of life.
Struts is certainly not the end all and be all but its better for medium to large projects than the alternatives I've looked at (caveat: I have not investigated JSF which someone mentioned)
I don't know, we just tiger teamed on this same paradigm at a standup meeting, and frankly most of their suggestions violate ISO 9000 and show no facility for CMI. Perhaps if they'd used a quality circle to better evaluate their stance, they'd actually have action items that would be meaningful.
Fortunately, we here in the business world don't have the same 'fashion trends' problem you software blokes seem to suffer.
A.
She is more scary. I mean, she could EAT the goatse guy
Or, she could climb in goatse guy.
If she did both at the same time, you'd have a wicked MC Escher drawing.