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I hate this kind of post. It's the tech equivalent of "You're a stupidhead". If you want to criticize Java then at least make some meaningful points. Just off

• famousactress 14y ago
  In his defense, I don't think the long class name is the problem he's pointing out.. it's the over-patterned, over-generalized nature of something that barely does anything. The class's description is "Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons." Seriously? That's fucking hilarious.
  • haberman 14y ago
    My favorite part is that the first word is "convenient." At the point that you need this class, absolutely nothing about the situation could possibly be considered "convenient."
    • mangler 14y ago
      If you spent your life being inconvenienced by the things you made earlier to make your life convenient, you'll go to extraordinary lengths to make other things that seem to make your life convenient given all the inconveniences you've already created for yourself. It does not really compute that this is another inconvenience you're building for yourself that is going to need another convenient AOP driven bean thing that you will write in a few months to get around the nonsense you burdened yourself with in the first place. It also does not help that everyone (well, at least the people with the money) is buying it and forcing it down their developers throats. If they don't want it, there's always a bunch of guys who are cheaper and will take it....
    • famousactress 14y ago
      Oh totally. I'm enjoying believing that this commit was part of a patch submitted with the explanation: "Added a new superclass because you wouldn't believe how hard it was to to create beans that create beans that create only singletons!" Turtles all the way down.
      • chris_wot 14y ago
        Yeah, that would be amusing if it was accurate. Only that's not what it does. It is actually a way of extending the bean creation part of the framework that produces singleton scoped proxy objects. I'm curious: what would you name that class?
        • famousactress 14y ago
          I can assure you I wouldn't name that class. But honestly, I'm kidding around. I'm not arguing the class is silly, or poorly named. I bet it's perfectly named. I'm not arguing the author did a bad thing here, I'm sure he or she did something awesome. All I'm saying is that the context that makes writing that class description necessary is totally hilarious. Let's just agree on that. It doesn't mean Java sucks or Spring sucks. Big complicated projects sometimes lead to pretty wacky situations and we ought to be able to laugh at them. I'm certainly not suggesting other languages don't have the same culdesacs of lunacy.. they totally all do. Can you imagine the number of times someone's posted "Everything that's wrong with Perl in one line of code" ? I really don't see any reason to take this stuff so seriously.
  • SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
    Frameworks are not applications. By their nature they are more abstract. Don't judge the code as if it was something it's not.
    • famousactress 14y ago
      Totally. I've worked on some frameworks, and I get that things get hairy supporting some really crazy general and re-useable concepts. I'm not even saying Spring is shitty, or Java is shitty or anything. I don't really care... but don't you dare tell me that class isn't hilarious, because it is.
      • mindcrime 14y ago
        I don't really care... but don't you dare tell me that class isn't hilarious, because it is. I don't see anything hilarious about it.
        • chris_wot 14y ago
          Indeed, the class isn't hilarious. Perhaps the class name initially boggles the mind, but when you learn what it does not only does it make sense, but you probably would be hard pressed to find a better name!
    • d0mine 14y ago
      It reminds me: "Why I Hate Frameworks" http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431 http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431
      • SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
        Hah. I'm not saying Spring is a good framework, I don't know it that well. But try building an app without any framework at all. Getting frameworks right is hard - they need to be abstract enough to be flexible, but not so abstract that you end up with a "general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory" when you want the framework to give you a hammer.
  • mibbitier 14y ago
    And that has absolutely nothing to do with Java. Why is it Javas fault that some idiot decided to create such a class?
    • famousactress 14y ago
      I guess there's a rule in place that hides the down arrow for comments in reply to my own or something. Anyways. I'd downvote if I could. The guy is almost certainly not an idiot. That's a rude, shitty thing to say. Further, if you accept that Spring is a good idea (which in my opinion is equivalent to accepting that Java has major shortcomings that require something like Spring to overcome) then this class is likely plenty reasonable. Like other commenters have pointed out, frameworks are hard. Java makes them harder. In the context where Spring and Java are givens, I'm sure the author of the above is a very handy chap to know. Be nicer. [Edit: To be clear. I want to make sure there's no confusion that the point of my original comment was that the class is hilarious. Not that it's not justified, or that the author is foolish, or that Java is awful, or that Spring is awful. I don't have very strong opinions about any of those things.. other than assuming a committer on such a huge, demonstrably successful project is plenty smart and did the poor chaps who are in the unfortunate position of needing this class a great service.]
      • mibbitier 14y ago
        I've used Java for 10 years. I've never used Spring. I've never created an AbstractFactorySingleton. I've never used XML. There's nothing in Java that says you have to use anything in particular, apart from the runtime (Extremely solid), and the basic language syntax (IMHO nice enough). OK, maybe they're not an idiot. Maybe it's warranted. I'd say it's probably over engineered stupidity though. Even so, the title is like pointing to a stupidly constructed house and calling it "Everything that is wrong with bricks".
        • chris_wot 14y ago
          If you don't know what it's used for, or the purpose it was written for, then you aren't in a position to judge if it's stupid or not. I can assure you, it has a purpose, and that purpose is not stupid. The fact that the reason for the class is somewhat obscure and somewhat of a corner case does not make it unnecessary.
  • pron 14y ago
    Yeah, but that's just an over-patterned object-oriented design. This has nothing to do with Java specifically.
    • Buzaga 14y ago
      well, but all java coders are this way. I'm working on a rails app built by java coders learning rails and it's, sadly, a pain in the ass, it's not that the code is malfunctioning, just that everything looks like it's a quantic mechanics equations when in reality it's just a 10 piece lego. Sure, they're not 100% is this way, but empirically I can state that, I too thought overengineering was beautiful when I was learning it, lame.
    • chris_wot 14y ago
      Hardly. Firstly, AOP is a very effective and useful programming technique. It's used in a lot of places, and without it OOP would be considerably harder than it necessarily needs to be. Secondly, this is a class used to extend the Spring framework unobtrusively if it is needed. Most likely you would never need it (if you are even someone who uses Spring, which I somewhat doubt... If you are then you should really learn more about the framework you use) but there are doubtless folks who may need it at some point for some super complex or out of the ordinary project you haven't even dreamed of yet.
  • chris_wot 14y ago
    Given that Spring is mostly used via annotations or config files, yes this is indeed useful. It helps to know what you are criticising before you show your ignorance. A factory bean is a class that creates factories. You'll almost never need to create your own as you normally use the ones Spring provide for you. And with annotations, you'll likely never even notice them. A proxy factory bean is used for Aspect Oriented Programming in the Spring framework. AOP is a fantastic way of doing OOP. Try reading up on it before you knock it. Spring uses AOP via proxies. By using proxies, you don't need to inject bytecode via CGLIB, which while a totally valid way of doing AOP, adds another dependency to your project which you may not want or even need. Singletons are used by default by Spring, which is an IoC (Inversion Of Control) container. An IoC container is extremely useful as it fully decouples classes from one another - the container handles the coupling and you merely set things such as object creation up via annotations or configuration. One of the considerations needed to be taken into account when using Spring for object creation is to decide whether each object is created once and once only by the factory bean, or if multiple instances should be created. You usually use a singleton bean in Spring - otherwise you have to introduce tighter bean coupling with other beans, which kind of defeats the purpose of an IoC container. A bean is a JavaBean, which is a very simple but powerful convention used to allow reusable components in Java. So what does this do? It's a convenience class used to extend the Spring AOP framework should you need to do so without having to make changes within the Spring framework itself. Almost no application programmers will need to use it. However, if you have a very particular requirement for AOP proxy bean creation that is not currently handled by the Spring framework (unlikely) then you will indeed find it useful, and I dare say it is, indeed, convenient. In short, ignorance is OK. But mocking something in ignorance is pretty foolish, and your foolishness is on full display here. P.S. incidentally, Spring is now well past v2.5 and in fact the current version is 3.1.x. It helps to read the most up to date documentation when trying to understand something in a framework. The description of the class in the latest documentation now reads: Convenient superclass for FactoryBean types that produce singleton-scoped proxy objects http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/javadoc-api/org/springframework/aop/framework/AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.html http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/current/javadoc-a...
    • vampirechicken 14y ago
  • mindcrime 14y ago
    Seriously? That's fucking hilarious. Only if you isolate it from all context. Within the context of how Spring is built and works, it's all perfectly reasonable. As cletus said above, if someone is going to slag Java, they should really pick something to pick on that is actually deserving.
• T-hawk 14y ago
  It's not the long name that's being mocked, it's the underlying problem of which the name is a symptom: that Java tends towards too many layers of abstraction, and the strict object-oriented nature means that every one of those layers is expressed as an inheritance level or a Factory object or a Proxy object, all a dozen levels away from where any action and logic is actually happening.
  • ww520 14y ago
    What does that have anything to do with Java? It's the framework's problem.
    • ajross 14y ago
      Way, way, way too narrow. The Java standard library design and "framework meta-pattern" is what's being mocked here. It's java-the-community that we are laughing at via the straightforward label "Java". The fact that java-the-syntax or java-the-runtime can be used to code or deploy good software isn't really the point.
      • mongol 14y ago
        Then it would have been more accurate to refer to the standard library. There is no such ridiculous class there as far as I know.
        • ajross 14y ago
          Really? Obviously no single class is that ridiculous (hence the title of the linked article). But that nonsense is pervasive in Java, and largely driven by the standard libraries (less so the core stuff as the more peripheral layers). I specifically remembering Swing being introduced with all the MFC goodness and noticing that they'd defined and implemented a "Model" class to track state for ... a button.
          • jeremyjh 14y ago
• shortlived 14y ago
  I totally agree on java logging. Lambdas would be nice. Checked exceptions? I love them. Lastly Eclipse is THE best thing since sliced bread. I LOL'ed when you mentioned vim/emacs in the same sentence. Have you actually used Eclipse on a big code base? It's introspection is such a productivity booster. I've not used jetbrains in a decade, but nothing else out there beats it, hands down. Both in terms of speed and quality.
  • cletus 14y ago
    Did you read what I said? "vim/emacs are [for Java] no better". This was in part to head off the predictable chimes from some of "all IDEs are stupid, (vim|emacs) is the best thing since sliced bread". My tool of choice for Java is however IntelliJ, which is simply light years ahead of Eclipse (IMHO).
    • rickmode 14y ago
      > My tool of choice for Java is however IntelliJ, which is simply light years ahead of Eclipse (IMHO). I agree. Eclipse seems to always become unstable once enough plugins are installed. After a few updates and removals it ends up tipping over regularly. I suspect the underlying OSGi plugin system is a tricky thing to get right. Intellij IDEA seems to "just work". That said, I prefer coding in Clojure with Aquamacs but I've yet to get Clojure into a production system.
      • DomreiRoam 14y ago
        I m using IntelliJ at home but at work we use yoxos. Yoxos allows the creation of eclipse profile that make it easier to have stable eclipse. If you have a lot of eclipse users, I think yoxos is the way to go. But I still use IntelliJ at home :) NB: I m talking about this yoxos: https://yoxos.eclipsesource.com/ https://yoxos.eclipsesource.com/
    • shortlived 14y ago
      Yes, I read it and still think it's laughable that anyone would mention them in the same sentence...
• rickmode 14y ago
  The class combines no less than 6 concepts / design patterns: - Abstract - Singleton - Proxy - Factory - Bean - Interceptors It's not just a long name. The class makes sense in the context of this framework. The core problem (as others here point out) is that the Java flavor of OOP makes writing this sort of code idiomatic. On the upside, you feel really smart once you grok all these concepts simultaneously. After a couple years this you get to brand yourself a "Java Architect".
  • hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
    Overengineering at it's best.
    • chris_wot 14y ago
      Until, of course, you find you need to use it. Of course, you'll probably never need to use it, nor will you ever see it being used in your particular situation. But hey, it's all over-engineered nonsense, right?
  • moondowner 14y ago
    Agreed, this class is an exception of excellent engineering. Maybe people who don't develop in Spring find it 'wrong', but it's not.
  • amalag 14y ago
    This is a great comment. This is what a Java "Engineer" or "Architect" is supposed to understand. It is complex, but seems too abstracted from programming reality that it makes programming simple things more complicated then they have to be.
    • chris_wot 14y ago
      All of these things are useful and valid techniques for building scalable, maintainable and extensible code. Abstract is a pretty basic OO concept. You make an abstract class when you want it to be derived and never used directly. Singleton is where a class can only ever create one object. Harder than it sounds. Proxy is where the class interfaces with something else. Again, very useful. Proxies are used by Spring to implement AOP. Factory - abstracts away the creation of objects, in other words the client object does not need to know how to create objects. It's used extensively in the Spring IoC container. Beans are object that use simple but powerful conventions of creating reusable components in Java. Interceptors at used by AOP. If you use these concepts as they are intended to be used then your code will be cleaner, maintainable and a joy to work with.
• mongol 14y ago
  The title should have been "Everything that is wrong with Spring ... ". Then it would not have been especially accurate, but more accurate. I like Java better than I like Spring. Spring made a framework out of an idea, but not all ideas should be packaged. Ideas can also be embraced. Dependency injection is an idea that should be embraced, but not as a packaged solution. It is a pattern, not a a software project.
  • chris_wot 14y ago
    Actually, it would then have been entitled "A class that extends the Spring AOP easily and unobtrusively", or probably just as accurately "everything that is right with Spring". I seriously don't think you understand that at the core of Spring is an IoC container - it just so happens that Spring does a lot of other useful things.
  • mindcrime 14y ago
    It is a pattern, not a a software project. So you'd rather see every project that wants to use DI, roll their own DI implementation?
• pron 14y ago
  Regardless of this post (which, indeed, has little to do with Java per-se), Java the language might be outdated for many applications. But I believe it's now pretty widely acknowledged that Java's contribution isn't the language, but the platform. The JVM is the best performing, most stable managed runtime in existence. Not to mention the invaluable runtime profiling an monitoring that is years ahead of anything else out there. The platform (possibly used with some other JVM language) still gives the most bang-for-the-buck for performance critical, scalable applications.
• pmahoney 14y ago
  I actually really like Java logging (well, I like SLF4J and logback). On Ruby, I'm constantly at a loss on how to do logging. Sure, in Rails there's the Rails logger available pretty much everywhere. But if I'm writing a reusable library, I can't count on that. So what do I do? Demand every user of my library configure it with a logger? The stdlib Ruby logger also has no way to fine-tune log levels by class. In a Rails app, sometimes I want debug level, but I rarely care to see each and every SQL statement. (There tend to be hacks to monkey patch around the common cases suggesting others have been similarly frustrated.) Even if I use log4r or some other logger with more fine-grained tuning, within Rails, everything will be using the same logger object, so the typical Java method of tuning by giving each class its own logger doesn't work. Bleh. Give me SLF4J with logback any day. When writing a reusable Java library, I really have no qualms about using SLF4J.
• koevet 14y ago
  > Java logging is a clusterfuck Care to explain? Logback is easy to configure and extremely efficient > Something as simple as wanting symbolic links in a Maven build requires a third party plugin, last updated in 2007 (maven-junction-plugin) that requires something no longer in the central repo; If you are still using Maven it's your problem. Switch to Gradle and your life will be much better. > No lambdas yet; True, but if you really need them use Groovy or Scala. Groovy 2.0 is almost as fast as Java and Scala is fun. > Type erasure in generics and the consequences thereof (eg inability to create generics of primitive types unlike C#); True, but doesn't this lack of feature harm framework developers mostly? The same people which the article is critiquing. > Checked exceptions; You can just ignore them when you write new code. If you have to deal with code that throws them, just deal with them. Most of the modern frameworks nowadays don't use them. > No function references, lambdas, etc (still a year+ away); Groovy, Scala and the favorite kid on the block, Clojure > Eclipse is a hot mess (IMHO). And, no, for Java at least, vim/emacs simply are no better. IntelliJ is but for some reason they insist on making it hard to make plugins as their API changes every major version. Jetbrains seems to be going out of their way to make it hard; This is the only point for which I tend to agree. Eclipse is difficult to work with. IntelliJ on the other hand is a valid alternative. These days I mostly code in Sublime Text 2 though.
  • mindcrime 14y ago
    > Care to explain? Logback is easy to configure and extremely efficient Logback != "java logging". "Java logging" is some messy combination of JDK logging, Logback, Log4j, Commons Logging, SLF4J, some cruft that fell out of Avalon or Fortress or whatever it was, etc. And then you try to use a library that uses Commons logging alongside another library that uses log4j directly, alongside your code, which really wants to use SLF4J... or you deploy your code, which uses log4j, into JBoss, which configures it's own hacked version of logj4 before your code loads, and you run into needing to figure out RepositorySelectors... You'd be better off reading from Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis, Friedrich von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Necronomicon. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
  • vorg 14y ago
    >> No lambdas yet; > True, but if you really need them use Groovy or Scala. Groovy 2.0 is almost as fast as Java and Scala is fun. > Groovy, Scala and the favorite kid on the block, Clojure Java's upcoming lambdas will have lazily-evaluated results from its map, filter, reduce, etc lambdas. Both Scala and Clojure already have their lambdas/functions return lazily-evaluated results, but certainly not Groovy, neither version 1.x nor the just-released version 2.0.4. Groovy's closures only return strictly-evaluated results. In fact, 2.0.4 was released only 2 weeks after 2.0.2 to fix "some important issues with generics with the stub generator, as well as several related to the static type checking and static compilation features". (Version 2.0.3 was skipped because "it was mistakenly built with JDK 6 instead of JDK 7".) It may be "almost as fast as Java and Scala" but it certainly isn't fun or production-ready.
• rbanffy 14y ago
  > But long class names? Really? Is that all you've got? Who cares? Is that the only thing you think is wrong?
• xyzzy123 14y ago
  It fascinates me that I also believe that Java has serious issues, but I differ on dimensions. Well yes, logging. There is slf4j though. I think that works, although the fact that one needs a metaframework is... interesting. Eclipse? I love eclipse. I used emacs every day for 2 years, IRC in emacs, news in emacs, EVERYTHING in emacs. Eventually I got sick of IMAP blocking and interrupting the world. I grew to love Eclipse because I realised I could not efficiently comprehend Java code any more without it. Over-layering is a serious, serious problem in Java. I think I understand your point of view, but a big part of my job is performing code reviews. It really sh%ts me every time to have to jump through the Service, the ServiceImpl, then the Repository, the RepositoryImpl, the Dao, the DaoImpl and... oh, there's the fricking query. Thanks guys. My huge problem in Java is that I always find 8 classes where 2 would do. The extra classes do serve a purpose; they fulfil stereotyped, expected roles. In some ways the boilerplace reduces cognitive overhead. In other ways, it really does not. Personally as someone who reviews multi-million line codebases regularly for a living, I am actually terrified of hordes of new Java developers discovering lambdas or acquiring advanced generics. These things are tactical nuclear weapons of source code obfuscation in the hands of people whose judgement (through bitter experience) I no longer really trust. Spring is not evil, but it does make life difficult because it's hard to follow references. Fortunately, whenever you see an interface Foo you normally just have to jump to FooImpl. Because it turns out that 90% of interfaces are actually not needed; except culturally, stylistically or dogmatically. Personally I think they're over-used, but that's because my observation is that most interfaces (seriously, 90% level) are implemented only once. Agree on the checked exceptions though. That was a mistake. I think actually there is nothing wrong with Java as a language, but without sane leadership the corporate culture of it becomes uniquely byzantine.
• godbolev 14y ago
  Just out of curiosity, why do you think checked exceptions are bad?