10 ms·

Why I Hate Frameworks

126 points by Jebdm 18y ago

patio11 18y ago
An oldie (2005) but goodie. Although it is less about frameworks and more about a disease which was largely contained to Java enterprise-y architecture stuff. (I say as a practitioner in that field... remind me why we are using the Factory pattern here, again?)
- mattculbreth 18y ago
  It made its way into the .NET space also many years ago. Working on a pretty big application now with a big team. We have two sets of Factories, with interfaces between them so that nobody ever sees an actual class. Egads!
- johnyzee 18y ago
  > remind me why we are using the Factory pattern here, again? Because everything in J2EE, including design patterns, is driven by salivating greed, megalomania-level egos and lemming mentality (I have a similar comment in the original thread).
- fizx 18y ago
  In fairness, the Factory pattern is useful when you want to unit test classes with mocks. In dynamic languages, this is easy, but more static languages require jumping through hoops. Alternately, you could use something like Google Guice, but that's (sorta) a factory-factory. Basically, no one likes the situation, but they've chosen their tradeoffs, which they see as the lesser of N evils.
swombat 18y ago
Rails: Here's a kick-ass hammer, a kick-ass saw, a kick-ass measure tape, etc... Oh, and if you need them to be different from the default, you can modify them as you want, but we think the default works for most people.
- statictype 18y ago
  But don't bother checking for the spring mechanism that retracts the measure tape in case it breaks or the power supply connection point on the saw if it stops working. Those bits just magically work! :)
  - vesan 18y ago
    There must be hole in the spring mechanism testing procedure
  - swombat 18y ago
    They don't magically work. You'll understand the mechanism when you know a bit more about how to build a measure tape and a saw. Also, all the so-called magic is extensively and automatically tested, and so an order of magnitude more reliable than your own custom-rolled spring mechanisms.
    - nailer 18y ago
      Exactly. This is why the article is such a bad analogy - frameworks makes things simpler by handling things you'd already do without them. If you're making a spice rack: Without framework: DIY shed filled with tools Framework: IKEA
      - swombat 18y ago
        Well, not quite... that's a bad analogy too, actually... Rails isn't IKEA - and most java frameworks are definitely not IKEA. Frameworks are tools, not end products.
        parenthesis 18y ago
        Have you tried assembling an Ikea flat-pack?
        swombat 18y ago
mdasen 18y ago
Frameworks can sometimes be annoying. It's like learning a new sub-language on top of the programming language as there is a certain amount of familiarity you need with a framework's calls (ex. to program in Python, it goes a lot faster if you know that it's len(list) not list.length() and similarly if you're using Rails it's important to know that there is no validates_is_number, but there is validates_numericality_of). So, you start learning all these things that may or may not apply to your project - the language of the framework. And in some places it slows you down and you feel like there's abstraction just for the sake of abstraction, but in the end I think it's worth it. I also think Joel misses something: most programmers are bad programmers. They'll dig you into holes, write lots of spaghetti string code, etc. At least when they're using a framework there's some constraint on their madness. Frameworks (generally) make it a tad difficult to work outside of their constraints and so the default becomes to work in that standard way. So, you don't get people doing weird things as often - like building a string that is the page that they'll echo out like the piece of PHP I'm working on today does (guess they didn't realize that you could simply go out of PHP mode to do that).
- clintavo 18y ago
  I guess I'm one of those bad programmers who does "weird things" , I often create a string with my entire page and then output it. I thought it made more sense since I now have a string that I can run regexes on or find/replace if necessary. Also it makes it easy if I decide I want to cache the page somewhere, I think I must be "dumb and gets things done."
  - mixmax 18y ago
    I think there's a wee bit of differnece between creating a string with a whole page because you don't know that you can jump in and out of PHP mode and creating a string with a whole page in order to do regex'es on the string :-)
  - Ramone 18y ago
    PHP (I assume we're still talking about PHP) has had output buffering for about a decade. So yeah that is a weird thing. ;)
justindz 18y ago
A friend convinced me to try AppFuse once. I have a burning, probably un-justified hatred of Eclipse, so I tried the AppFuse + NetBeans tutorial. That may be the most unproductive I have felt in my entire life. I made a damn login form and it took like 12 pages of tutorial, tons of setup, generating a whole bunch of files that seemed like they could have been done algorithmically because they are always the same, editing like nine different XML files with little bits of glue, and eventually like one or maybe two lines of code. Then, I got to wait for the WAR to compile each time I wanted to test a change, because the tutorial didn't seem to know about a developer mode which probably exists. I hate to sound all ranty and partisan, but I could find no way in which that process could be efficient and couldn't imagine anyone doing it voluntarily unless they were ordered or just had no exposure to the rest of the world. Also, I sort of object to having code stuffed in an eight-folder deep hierarchy where the preceding seven folders contain nothing at all. That's a lot of wasted navigation and clicking time and distraction.
- arockwell 18y ago
  There's most likely a developer mode, but that's only good for reloading a change to a Java class file. Reloading an xml file will still take a restart of the servlet container. I agree with you that there is basically nothing efficient about the entire process.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
arockwell 18y ago
On a related note, I saw this on reddit this morning: http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server/RequestProcessorFactoryFactory.html?rel=html http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server... What's sad is that I have no idea if this is a joke or not.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  Perfect thing to show people, when they want to know if Java is a good fit for their problem. Even a Pointy Haired Boss, shown this, might understand why Rails or Django or something might be a better way to go than dealing with this. EDIT: OK, so instead of Java, that should read "to know if enterprisey Java frameworks are a good fit for their problem." The irony is, that I just was IM'ing a friend about how this isn't the fault of Java the Language, but the "enterprise architecture" community that write Java frameworks like this.
  - dgabriel 18y ago
    Java is not the problem, the architecture is the problem. If you try hard enough, you can make something unwieldy and atrocious in ANY language. That's why enterprise architects get the big bucks.
    - chaostheory 18y ago
      That may be true, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make fugly spaghetti in something statically typed like Java (or C#, C++, and so on). After 8 years of Java, I personally found it really refreshing to build stuff in Python and Ruby.
      - dgabriel 18y ago
        I don't know. After seeing some pretty unbelievable crap in VB, php, and javascript, I bet it's more a matter of numbers. The kinds of people who program in Python or Ruby aren't off the assembly line because the industry demand isn't as high. If one of those languages manages to become as widely used as Java, plan on seeing fugly spaghetti.
lallysingh 18y ago
I've seen good frameworks (OWL, Nitrogen + Powerplant, maybe 1 or 2 more), and I've seen a crap-ton of bad frameworks (any web framework on java, minus maybe WebObjects). They're necessary, but they're hard to do right. The man who did Powerplant said he went through about a dozen different designs before getting one he liked. That's why it was often so useful. Most times, people say "hey, let's take these APIs and let people subclass! yay!" And that's how you end up with crap like doGet(), doPost(), etc.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  "minus maybe WebObjects" What made WO great were the tools. There was still complexity there, but WOBuilder and EOModeler made the whole process very productive. You could think of your data model, your interface, and your business logic independently of each other, and then use the tools to hook them together in a way that made sense. Because of the way the tools were designed, they actually made using good design for your application easier than using bad design. That's the main thing missing from all the frameworks I see today, integrated tools that automate the tedious parts and encourage good design practices. To me, the WO tools go on the heap with the Lisp Machine, the Xerox Park Smalltalk environment and HyperCard, as old development technologies that are still ahead of today's state of the art. EDIT: spelling correction
  - gnaritas 18y ago
    That would be Smalltalk not SmallTalk, and some of us still use it, daily, for web apps. It might not be in wide use, but it isn't on the scrap heap.
    - boucher 18y ago
      People still use WebObjects everyday too (I used to be one of them), but not very many. I'd say WebObjects is basically on the scrap heap.
  - coolestuk 18y ago
    I would agree with you, apart from the remarks about "the (scrap) heap" :-) . I still use two of those technologies (WebObjects and Hypercard) almost every day, and I never used either of them until about 5 years ago. For what they do, they are peerless. For information about using WebObjects I'd suggest people visit http://www.wocommunity.org http://www.wocommunity.org, and if anyone's interested in Hypercard, try http://www.runrev.com http://www.runrev.com (a modern cross-platform hypercard).
stcredzero 18y ago
Over-complexity is common in the Java space. I was aghast at using JMS. You make a Context so that you can tell it to make a ConnectionFactory, so that you can then ask that thing for a Connection, then you finally get to login. You can then instantiate Producers and Consumers and finally get messages. Why do I need to have 5 different objects when one would do? Having 5 different objects did absolutely nothing for the client code except make it more complex. (And this actually complicates good coding for the user experience. When we notify the user of network problems, I have to add additional code to see if objects exist in the first place just to prevent exceptions.) It would've made no difference if there was just one Object. (Except for shorter code.) I could use it to login to a server. I could use it to register interest in a topic then ask for messages on that topic. If I want to connect to a different server, then I could instantiate a second object. Why do I need 5 freaking instances to do the most basic thing possible?
- arockwell 18y ago
  This also makes unit testing extremely diffcult since you have the joy of creating mock objects for your Context, ConnectionFactory and Connection. I have all but given up writing test code at work. The various j2ee frameworks I have to use make it almost impossible.
  - st3fan 18y ago
    Drop Classic J2EE and learn Spring. It will make things sooo much easier and manageable.
    - mattmcknight 18y ago
      It definitely does make the above more manageable, but it doesn't solve the core problem which is that the whole design pattern is built for complete configurability, but without sensible defaults. In some sense, Spring only exists to manage the massive configurability of Java design patterns, but by adding it's own configurations to the mix. It's definitely a cool idea, but the better solution is to just avoid factory/context patterns. It's solving a problem most of us don't have.
edw519 18y ago
Here's the dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about... The purpose of "assisters" like frameworks and higher level languages is NOT to make good progammers more efficient. It's to make mediocre programmers more likely to produce something of value and to make poor programmers capable of producing anything at all. And if the bell curve tells us anything at all, it's that these "tools" target 90% of all programmers. But think about it, my fellow top 10% (lol), do you really need all this stuff? If you're working alone or on a small team with a clear objective, haven't you always had everything you needed with low level tools? If you need any higher level tools or reuseable components, haven't you already been building these all along? Sure it's fun to play with new things and learn from others, but when it comes time to really produce, don't we all know how to (and need to) roll with what we know? The need for frameworks and high level languages only becomes apparent when we grow so large that we can't find enough senior hackers. Only when you dip down into the mediocre masses do you need this help.
- snorkel 18y ago
  I agree completely. Web frameworks add a layer of code bureaucracy that really doesn't need to be there in most cases. Reading and setting browser cookies is not that hard. Creating and reading web forms and validating inputs is not hard. Creating a relational database schema and objects that store themselves in that schema is not hard. You can do all of this directly in mod_python, essentialy by buildng your own framework, so you really don't need Django (I'm know, I'm a heretic for saying so) But doing all of these things directly mod_python takes time to learn how to do it reliably and efficiently. So I understand Django's appeal to people who picked up a Python book and asked "How do I create an event calendar web site in five mouse clicks?" and didn't see a direct answer to that question so they went with a framework. Personally I'd rather not toil under the tyranny of someone else's framework, especially when they suggest you need to create Factory for a Consumer then connect it to an Active Bridge connector... no thanks, I'll just use "mod_python import Cookie" instead.
  - DanHulton 18y ago
    "essentially by building your own framework" Why build your own framework when there's one already there? Already well-used, well-tested, well-extended? Sure it may be easy enough to do, but is it really worth it? I, for one, would much prefer to be spending my coding time writing application logic than Yet Another Validation Library.
nihilocrat 18y ago
The more people talk about J2EE, the more I think it was invented to give programmers busywork and multiply their workload with no increase in productivity.
- snorkel 18y ago
  Sort of reminds of project management software: it's just there to keep the project manager busy.
DanHulton 18y ago
Frameworks - used properly - can be INCREDIBLY helpful. Why develop my own routing code when there's already a robust, well-tested version available? Or validation code? Or payment authorization code? Though it needs to be said that the number one thing a good framework does is GET OUT OF YOUR WAY. I've seen some Java frameworks that take an hour to put together a simple Hello World and that's just nonsense. Currently I'm using Kohana, which is nice because it's really very simple and easy to extend. So far I've been able to spend so much more of my time actually writing business logic instead of routing logic and the like.
- mattmcknight 18y ago
  Unfortunately, JSR-168 compliant portlets are perhaps the crowning example of horrible implementations of an insane standard.
st3fan 18y ago
I stopped reading after "In the process, I'm evaluating a bunch of J2EE portlet-enabled JSR-compliant MVC role-based CMS web service application container frameworks."
- ynd 18y ago
  That was humor :) The rest is funnier. Give it a try.
rantfoil 18y ago
Was anyone else put off by "And, if you want to kill your ex-girlfriend, there's really no substitute for a ball-peen hammer"? I get it's a joke, but violence against women, when used in a semi-professional context in a community of software engineers is one of those things that keeps more women out of the field in the long run. I'm not trying to be PC intentionally -- it just struck a raw nerve for me.
- axod 18y ago
  That's just.... ridiculous. The main thing that keeps women out of the industry is the fact they don't want to be in the industry and for you to suggest otherwise, is sexist.
jaytee_clone 18y ago
I feel the analogue here is a bit off. I'd say a framework is more like a factory that produces a variety of fixed-size spice racks (among with other products). You have to learn what button to press to get the right ones, and the spice racks produced will never be exactly how you want them to be. If you want to quickly generate lots of generic spice rack, then a spice rack factory is all you need. But if you want something really outstanding and unique, then a factory may be anti-productive, and you are better off building it with your own hands.
tolmasky 18y ago
This is about as ridiculous as trying out one bad programming language and then writing an article titled "Why I Hate Programming Languages". Clearly the author has a problem with one particularly bad set of frameworks he's dealing with now, and one set of framework-making mentalities. Yes, there are bad frameworks. There are good frameworks too. I don't imagine anyone draws their own buttons on the screen anymore. To continue the discussion in any general format is useless, since there are countless examples of bad frameworks and countless counter-examples of good frameworks. A more compelling discussion would be one on what makes certain frameworks useful rather than trying to place a final value judgement on the idea entirely.
dasil003 18y ago
The essay itself is funny and rings true, but then in the comments the author says: "What I'd really like to find are some appropriate libraries that I can use to provide several kinds of functionality for my project." And then lists a bunch of high-level website functionality requirements (user accounts, content management, etc). I realize that the J2EE landscape was drowning in complexity and was pretty dismal in 2005, but this guy doesn't understand the issues involved in developing web applications. First, to suggest that individual libraries can provide re-usable high level web application code is completely ludicrous. It can't work for so many reasons: * All those libraries will have to interact, and the interface between them will be complex. If they do work together they will end up being tightly coupled and before you know it you have a framework. * High level functionality that includes data models, persistence, and presentation layers is not generic enough to effectively be a library. The complexity and configuration would quickly balloon out of control before it met even the requirements of 5% of web applications. * Such libraries would end up being far more constricting than a traditional framework. A good example is Drupal, which is a very powerful framework/CMS with an impressive hook system, and an extremely high code to functionality ratio. Anything you might want to do with a website can probably be done in Drupal using a combination of existing modules, and you can write additional modules that access almost any part of the system and modify its behavior. The problem is that fine-tuning of the interface or certain kinds of customizations become very difficult under the crushing weight of the underlying assumptions that Drupal makes to enable it's magnificent generic-ness. The result is that all the various sites made with Drupal end up feeling very Drupal-y and there's a disincentive to really design your UI from the ground up and create a very optimized application. What J2EE has blinded the author to is the fact that web frameworks exist to solve the most common problems that come up over and over again in web development. He needs to go write a few PHP applications to get a feel for the issues, then try something lighter-weight like Django or Rails that confronts those issues directly and then basically gets out of the way. In the first half of the decade it was hard to find a good lightweight framework because people were still wrapping their heads around the actual issues that needed to be solved. Nowadays, not so much.
dang 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20180924092925/http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com:80/default.asp?joel.3.219431.12 http://web.archive.org/web/20180924092925/http://discuss.joe...

126 points by Jebdm 18y ago

An oldie (2005) but goodie. Although it is less about frameworks and more about a disease which was largely contained to Java enterprise-y architecture stuff. (I say as a practitioner in that field... remind me why we are using the Factory pattern here, again?)

mattculbreth 18y ago
It made its way into the .NET space also many years ago. Working on a pretty big application now with a big team. We have two sets of Factories, with interfaces between them so that nobody ever sees an actual class. Egads!
johnyzee 18y ago
> remind me why we are using the Factory pattern here, again? Because everything in J2EE, including design patterns, is driven by salivating greed, megalomania-level egos and lemming mentality (I have a similar comment in the original thread).
fizx 18y ago
In fairness, the Factory pattern is useful when you want to unit test classes with mocks. In dynamic languages, this is easy, but more static languages require jumping through hoops. Alternately, you could use something like Google Guice, but that's (sorta) a factory-factory. Basically, no one likes the situation, but they've chosen their tradeoffs, which they see as the lesser of N evils.

swombat 18y ago

Rails: Here's a kick-ass hammer, a kick-ass saw, a kick-ass measure tape, etc... Oh, and if you need them to be different from the default, you can modify them as you want, but we think the default works for most people.

statictype 18y ago
But don't bother checking for the spring mechanism that retracts the measure tape in case it breaks or the power supply connection point on the saw if it stops working. Those bits just magically work! :)
- vesan 18y ago
  There must be hole in the spring mechanism testing procedure
- swombat 18y ago
  They don't magically work. You'll understand the mechanism when you know a bit more about how to build a measure tape and a saw. Also, all the so-called magic is extensively and automatically tested, and so an order of magnitude more reliable than your own custom-rolled spring mechanisms.
  - nailer 18y ago
    Exactly. This is why the article is such a bad analogy - frameworks makes things simpler by handling things you'd already do without them. If you're making a spice rack: Without framework: DIY shed filled with tools Framework: IKEA
    - swombat 18y ago
      Well, not quite... that's a bad analogy too, actually... Rails isn't IKEA - and most java frameworks are definitely not IKEA. Frameworks are tools, not end products.
      - parenthesis 18y ago
        Have you tried assembling an Ikea flat-pack?
        swombat 18y ago

mdasen 18y ago

Frameworks can sometimes be annoying. It's like learning a new sub-language on top of the programming language as there is a certain amount of familiarity you need with a framework's calls (ex. to program in Python, it goes a lot faster if you know that it's len(list) not list.length() and similarly if you're using Rails it's important to know that there is no validates_is_number, but there is validates_numericality_of). So, you start learning all these things that may or may not apply to your project - the language of the framework. And in some places it slows you down and you feel like there's abstraction just for the sake of abstraction, but in the end I think it's worth it. I also think Joel misses something: most programmers are bad programmers. They'll dig you into holes, write lots of spaghetti string code, etc. At least when they're using a framework there's some constraint on their madness. Frameworks (generally) make it a tad difficult to work outside of their constraints and so the default becomes to work in that standard way. So, you don't get people doing weird things as often - like building a string that is the page that they'll echo out like the piece of PHP I'm working on today does (guess they didn't realize that you could simply go out of PHP mode to do that).

clintavo 18y ago
I guess I'm one of those bad programmers who does "weird things" , I often create a string with my entire page and then output it. I thought it made more sense since I now have a string that I can run regexes on or find/replace if necessary. Also it makes it easy if I decide I want to cache the page somewhere, I think I must be "dumb and gets things done."
- mixmax 18y ago
  I think there's a wee bit of differnece between creating a string with a whole page because you don't know that you can jump in and out of PHP mode and creating a string with a whole page in order to do regex'es on the string :-)
- Ramone 18y ago
  PHP (I assume we're still talking about PHP) has had output buffering for about a decade. So yeah that is a weird thing. ;)

justindz 18y ago

A friend convinced me to try AppFuse once. I have a burning, probably un-justified hatred of Eclipse, so I tried the AppFuse + NetBeans tutorial. That may be the most unproductive I have felt in my entire life. I made a damn login form and it took like 12 pages of tutorial, tons of setup, generating a whole bunch of files that seemed like they could have been done algorithmically because they are always the same, editing like nine different XML files with little bits of glue, and eventually like one or maybe two lines of code. Then, I got to wait for the WAR to compile each time I wanted to test a change, because the tutorial didn't seem to know about a developer mode which probably exists. I hate to sound all ranty and partisan, but I could find no way in which that process could be efficient and couldn't imagine anyone doing it voluntarily unless they were ordered or just had no exposure to the rest of the world. Also, I sort of object to having code stuffed in an eight-folder deep hierarchy where the preceding seven folders contain nothing at all. That's a lot of wasted navigation and clicking time and distraction.

arockwell 18y ago
There's most likely a developer mode, but that's only good for reloading a change to a Java class file. Reloading an xml file will still take a restart of the servlet container. I agree with you that there is basically nothing efficient about the entire process.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

arockwell 18y ago

On a related note, I saw this on reddit this morning: http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server/RequestProcessorFactoryFactory.html?rel=html http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server... What's sad is that I have no idea if this is a joke or not.

jimbokun 18y ago
Perfect thing to show people, when they want to know if Java is a good fit for their problem. Even a Pointy Haired Boss, shown this, might understand why Rails or Django or something might be a better way to go than dealing with this. EDIT: OK, so instead of Java, that should read "to know if enterprisey Java frameworks are a good fit for their problem." The irony is, that I just was IM'ing a friend about how this isn't the fault of Java the Language, but the "enterprise architecture" community that write Java frameworks like this.
- dgabriel 18y ago
  Java is not the problem, the architecture is the problem. If you try hard enough, you can make something unwieldy and atrocious in ANY language. That's why enterprise architects get the big bucks.
  - chaostheory 18y ago
    That may be true, but it's a hell of a lot easier to make fugly spaghetti in something statically typed like Java (or C#, C++, and so on). After 8 years of Java, I personally found it really refreshing to build stuff in Python and Ruby.
    - dgabriel 18y ago
      I don't know. After seeing some pretty unbelievable crap in VB, php, and javascript, I bet it's more a matter of numbers. The kinds of people who program in Python or Ruby aren't off the assembly line because the industry demand isn't as high. If one of those languages manages to become as widely used as Java, plan on seeing fugly spaghetti.

lallysingh 18y ago

I've seen good frameworks (OWL, Nitrogen + Powerplant, maybe 1 or 2 more), and I've seen a crap-ton of bad frameworks (any web framework on java, minus maybe WebObjects). They're necessary, but they're hard to do right. The man who did Powerplant said he went through about a dozen different designs before getting one he liked. That's why it was often so useful. Most times, people say "hey, let's take these APIs and let people subclass! yay!" And that's how you end up with crap like doGet(), doPost(), etc.

jimbokun 18y ago
"minus maybe WebObjects" What made WO great were the tools. There was still complexity there, but WOBuilder and EOModeler made the whole process very productive. You could think of your data model, your interface, and your business logic independently of each other, and then use the tools to hook them together in a way that made sense. Because of the way the tools were designed, they actually made using good design for your application easier than using bad design. That's the main thing missing from all the frameworks I see today, integrated tools that automate the tedious parts and encourage good design practices. To me, the WO tools go on the heap with the Lisp Machine, the Xerox Park Smalltalk environment and HyperCard, as old development technologies that are still ahead of today's state of the art. EDIT: spelling correction
- gnaritas 18y ago
  That would be Smalltalk not SmallTalk, and some of us still use it, daily, for web apps. It might not be in wide use, but it isn't on the scrap heap.
  - boucher 18y ago
    People still use WebObjects everyday too (I used to be one of them), but not very many. I'd say WebObjects is basically on the scrap heap.
- coolestuk 18y ago
  I would agree with you, apart from the remarks about "the (scrap) heap" :-) . I still use two of those technologies (WebObjects and Hypercard) almost every day, and I never used either of them until about 5 years ago. For what they do, they are peerless. For information about using WebObjects I'd suggest people visit http://www.wocommunity.org http://www.wocommunity.org, and if anyone's interested in Hypercard, try http://www.runrev.com http://www.runrev.com (a modern cross-platform hypercard).

stcredzero 18y ago

Over-complexity is common in the Java space. I was aghast at using JMS. You make a Context so that you can tell it to make a ConnectionFactory, so that you can then ask that thing for a Connection, then you finally get to login. You can then instantiate Producers and Consumers and finally get messages. Why do I need to have 5 different objects when one would do? Having 5 different objects did absolutely nothing for the client code except make it more complex. (And this actually complicates good coding for the user experience. When we notify the user of network problems, I have to add additional code to see if objects exist in the first place just to prevent exceptions.) It would've made no difference if there was just one Object. (Except for shorter code.) I could use it to login to a server. I could use it to register interest in a topic then ask for messages on that topic. If I want to connect to a different server, then I could instantiate a second object. Why do I need 5 freaking instances to do the most basic thing possible?

arockwell 18y ago
This also makes unit testing extremely diffcult since you have the joy of creating mock objects for your Context, ConnectionFactory and Connection. I have all but given up writing test code at work. The various j2ee frameworks I have to use make it almost impossible.
- st3fan 18y ago
  Drop Classic J2EE and learn Spring. It will make things sooo much easier and manageable.
  - mattmcknight 18y ago
    It definitely does make the above more manageable, but it doesn't solve the core problem which is that the whole design pattern is built for complete configurability, but without sensible defaults. In some sense, Spring only exists to manage the massive configurability of Java design patterns, but by adding it's own configurations to the mix. It's definitely a cool idea, but the better solution is to just avoid factory/context patterns. It's solving a problem most of us don't have.

edw519 18y ago

Here's the dirty little secret that no one wants to talk about... The purpose of "assisters" like frameworks and higher level languages is NOT to make good progammers more efficient. It's to make mediocre programmers more likely to produce something of value and to make poor programmers capable of producing anything at all. And if the bell curve tells us anything at all, it's that these "tools" target 90% of all programmers. But think about it, my fellow top 10% (lol), do you really need all this stuff? If you're working alone or on a small team with a clear objective, haven't you always had everything you needed with low level tools? If you need any higher level tools or reuseable components, haven't you already been building these all along? Sure it's fun to play with new things and learn from others, but when it comes time to really produce, don't we all know how to (and need to) roll with what we know? The need for frameworks and high level languages only becomes apparent when we grow so large that we can't find enough senior hackers. Only when you dip down into the mediocre masses do you need this help.

snorkel 18y ago
I agree completely. Web frameworks add a layer of code bureaucracy that really doesn't need to be there in most cases. Reading and setting browser cookies is not that hard. Creating and reading web forms and validating inputs is not hard. Creating a relational database schema and objects that store themselves in that schema is not hard. You can do all of this directly in mod_python, essentialy by buildng your own framework, so you really don't need Django (I'm know, I'm a heretic for saying so) But doing all of these things directly mod_python takes time to learn how to do it reliably and efficiently. So I understand Django's appeal to people who picked up a Python book and asked "How do I create an event calendar web site in five mouse clicks?" and didn't see a direct answer to that question so they went with a framework. Personally I'd rather not toil under the tyranny of someone else's framework, especially when they suggest you need to create Factory for a Consumer then connect it to an Active Bridge connector... no thanks, I'll just use "mod_python import Cookie" instead.
- DanHulton 18y ago
  "essentially by building your own framework" Why build your own framework when there's one already there? Already well-used, well-tested, well-extended? Sure it may be easy enough to do, but is it really worth it? I, for one, would much prefer to be spending my coding time writing application logic than Yet Another Validation Library.

nihilocrat 18y ago

The more people talk about J2EE, the more I think it was invented to give programmers busywork and multiply their workload with no increase in productivity.

snorkel 18y ago
Sort of reminds of project management software: it's just there to keep the project manager busy.

DanHulton 18y ago

Frameworks - used properly - can be INCREDIBLY helpful. Why develop my own routing code when there's already a robust, well-tested version available? Or validation code? Or payment authorization code? Though it needs to be said that the number one thing a good framework does is GET OUT OF YOUR WAY. I've seen some Java frameworks that take an hour to put together a simple Hello World and that's just nonsense. Currently I'm using Kohana, which is nice because it's really very simple and easy to extend. So far I've been able to spend so much more of my time actually writing business logic instead of routing logic and the like.

mattmcknight 18y ago
Unfortunately, JSR-168 compliant portlets are perhaps the crowning example of horrible implementations of an insane standard.

st3fan 18y ago

I stopped reading after "In the process, I'm evaluating a bunch of J2EE portlet-enabled JSR-compliant MVC role-based CMS web service application container frameworks."

ynd 18y ago
That was humor :) The rest is funnier. Give it a try.

rantfoil 18y ago

Was anyone else put off by "And, if you want to kill your ex-girlfriend, there's really no substitute for a ball-peen hammer"? I get it's a joke, but violence against women, when used in a semi-professional context in a community of software engineers is one of those things that keeps more women out of the field in the long run. I'm not trying to be PC intentionally -- it just struck a raw nerve for me.

axod 18y ago
That's just.... ridiculous. The main thing that keeps women out of the industry is the fact they don't want to be in the industry and for you to suggest otherwise, is sexist.

jaytee_clone 18y ago

I feel the analogue here is a bit off. I'd say a framework is more like a factory that produces a variety of fixed-size spice racks (among with other products). You have to learn what button to press to get the right ones, and the spice racks produced will never be exactly how you want them to be. If you want to quickly generate lots of generic spice rack, then a spice rack factory is all you need. But if you want something really outstanding and unique, then a factory may be anti-productive, and you are better off building it with your own hands.

tolmasky 18y ago

This is about as ridiculous as trying out one bad programming language and then writing an article titled "Why I Hate Programming Languages". Clearly the author has a problem with one particularly bad set of frameworks he's dealing with now, and one set of framework-making mentalities. Yes, there are bad frameworks. There are good frameworks too. I don't imagine anyone draws their own buttons on the screen anymore. To continue the discussion in any general format is useless, since there are countless examples of bad frameworks and countless counter-examples of good frameworks. A more compelling discussion would be one on what makes certain frameworks useful rather than trying to place a final value judgement on the idea entirely.

dasil003 18y ago

The essay itself is funny and rings true, but then in the comments the author says: "What I'd really like to find are some appropriate libraries that I can use to provide several kinds of functionality for my project." And then lists a bunch of high-level website functionality requirements (user accounts, content management, etc). I realize that the J2EE landscape was drowning in complexity and was pretty dismal in 2005, but this guy doesn't understand the issues involved in developing web applications. First, to suggest that individual libraries can provide re-usable high level web application code is completely ludicrous. It can't work for so many reasons: * All those libraries will have to interact, and the interface between them will be complex. If they do work together they will end up being tightly coupled and before you know it you have a framework. * High level functionality that includes data models, persistence, and presentation layers is not generic enough to effectively be a library. The complexity and configuration would quickly balloon out of control before it met even the requirements of 5% of web applications. * Such libraries would end up being far more constricting than a traditional framework. A good example is Drupal, which is a very powerful framework/CMS with an impressive hook system, and an extremely high code to functionality ratio. Anything you might want to do with a website can probably be done in Drupal using a combination of existing modules, and you can write additional modules that access almost any part of the system and modify its behavior. The problem is that fine-tuning of the interface or certain kinds of customizations become very difficult under the crushing weight of the underlying assumptions that Drupal makes to enable it's magnificent generic-ness. The result is that all the various sites made with Drupal end up feeling very Drupal-y and there's a disincentive to really design your UI from the ground up and create a very optimized application. What J2EE has blinded the author to is the fact that web frameworks exist to solve the most common problems that come up over and over again in web development. He needs to go write a few PHP applications to get a feel for the issues, then try something lighter-weight like Django or Rails that confronts those issues directly and then basically gets out of the way. In the first half of the decade it was hard to find a good lightweight framework because people were still wrapping their heads around the actual issues that needed to be solved. Nowadays, not so much.

dang 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20180924092925/http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com:80/default.asp?joel.3.219431.12 http://web.archive.org/web/20180924092925/http://discuss.joe...