4 ms·

it seems common among ex-employees.

by throwawayaway 12y ago

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
IBM probably deserves it, but they have already stopped being relevant to most of us.
- fat0wl 12y ago
  ...in the myopic startup world. I work for an enterprise doing WebSphere & I'm scared to see it go one day actually -- will be cool if it cheapens to the point where it is equivalent to an open source tech but I think its the proprietary nature that got it to where it is. Pretty big learning curve but it is rock-solid and would be quite an upgrade from a lot of the scripting lang stacks if it were to hit the world at large. Coming from RoR it feels like moving from a toy plane to a Harrier jet.
  - anonymousDan 12y ago
    '...but it's rock solid...'. From someone who did a lot of robustness testing against WebSphere in the course of writing a JMS adapter, you have got to be kidding?
    - fat0wl 12y ago
      I think the clarification "watwut" makes is fitting -- it's not like it's complete perfection in every situation, but I use WebSphere 8.0 running a ton of apps written in a pretty wide variety of techs (Portal, Commerce, Message Broker, services). It even runs crappy legacy projects with minimal changes (literally 1 or 2 quick fixes suggested by IDE). Obviously it is a bit opinionated & works best when you code specifically for the APIs/standards it is currently attempting to embrace, but the all the open source scripting tools I've used are way more opinionated. I like WAS's take because I often find that it's exposing services that I don't even know about until I eventually need them. And it's not a lot of bloaty junk, it's essential JavaEE interfaces/protocols. I'll admit it took a while to grow on me and we have fantastic hardware...
  - watwut 12y ago
    WebSphere may be upgrade from a lot of the scripting lang stacks, but it still is a horrible crap. I think that open source J2EE compliant alternatives exist and are much much better.
  - sk5t 12y ago
    The solid parts are actually the JRE / JVM...
    - fat0wl 12y ago
      eh yeah but it doesn't hurt to have an admin GUI and a ton of default stack config done for you, that's all I mean. WebSphere is like a 1-click install for a massive stack. The open source community seems to like DropWizard, Websphere is just like that on steroids. I'm sure a comparable stack can be made from open source components though and there are other companies who do the pre-packaged stack approach, I know. But WebSphere is kinda convenient and nicely integrated is all I mean. After spending a ton of time chasing down gem dependency conflict/upgrade issues using package managers in Ruby, I'm kindof impressed with the prescription full-stack. It's just like having a corp do all the dependency/interop checks so you don't have to. Limiting in a way but reduces a lot of friction.
- BankingAnon 12y ago
  If you've ever read "IBM And The Holocaust" [1], you might say they deserve much more than this. 1. http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation/dp/0914153102 http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corpo...

it seems common among ex-employees.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

IBM probably deserves it, but they have already stopped being relevant to most of us.

fat0wl 12y ago
...in the myopic startup world. I work for an enterprise doing WebSphere & I'm scared to see it go one day actually -- will be cool if it cheapens to the point where it is equivalent to an open source tech but I think its the proprietary nature that got it to where it is. Pretty big learning curve but it is rock-solid and would be quite an upgrade from a lot of the scripting lang stacks if it were to hit the world at large. Coming from RoR it feels like moving from a toy plane to a Harrier jet.
- anonymousDan 12y ago
  '...but it's rock solid...'. From someone who did a lot of robustness testing against WebSphere in the course of writing a JMS adapter, you have got to be kidding?
  - fat0wl 12y ago
    I think the clarification "watwut" makes is fitting -- it's not like it's complete perfection in every situation, but I use WebSphere 8.0 running a ton of apps written in a pretty wide variety of techs (Portal, Commerce, Message Broker, services). It even runs crappy legacy projects with minimal changes (literally 1 or 2 quick fixes suggested by IDE). Obviously it is a bit opinionated & works best when you code specifically for the APIs/standards it is currently attempting to embrace, but the all the open source scripting tools I've used are way more opinionated. I like WAS's take because I often find that it's exposing services that I don't even know about until I eventually need them. And it's not a lot of bloaty junk, it's essential JavaEE interfaces/protocols. I'll admit it took a while to grow on me and we have fantastic hardware...
- watwut 12y ago
  WebSphere may be upgrade from a lot of the scripting lang stacks, but it still is a horrible crap. I think that open source J2EE compliant alternatives exist and are much much better.
- sk5t 12y ago
  The solid parts are actually the JRE / JVM...
  - fat0wl 12y ago
    eh yeah but it doesn't hurt to have an admin GUI and a ton of default stack config done for you, that's all I mean. WebSphere is like a 1-click install for a massive stack. The open source community seems to like DropWizard, Websphere is just like that on steroids. I'm sure a comparable stack can be made from open source components though and there are other companies who do the pre-packaged stack approach, I know. But WebSphere is kinda convenient and nicely integrated is all I mean. After spending a ton of time chasing down gem dependency conflict/upgrade issues using package managers in Ruby, I'm kindof impressed with the prescription full-stack. It's just like having a corp do all the dependency/interop checks so you don't have to. Limiting in a way but reduces a lot of friction.
BankingAnon 12y ago
If you've ever read "IBM And The Holocaust" [1], you might say they deserve much more than this. 1. http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation/dp/0914153102 http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corpo...