Re: Tales from the Dark Side

I forwarded the post more for the Hibernate/Tapestry experience than
anything else (I know WO folks like to look over the fence every now and
then),  but you have a point about many open source initiatives. Until they
get some traction, many flounder and die. Hibernate, Tapestry and RoR all
appear to have traction. RoR is only at release 1.0, so it may be too early
to make that assertion, but it looks positive. And I must say that the folks
on the mailing lists for both Tapestry and RoR seem very helpful (I
unsubscribed from the Hibernate one a while back because of the vitriol).

Being a WO developer since the glory days of 2.0 and recently having to dive
into the java opensource stack myself, it sure is nice to have access to the
source code when things don't work as advertised. But in all those years (10
- jeez!) of WO development I have only really ever had the support of the
good folks on this mailing list (and Martin Reed in my formative years - hi
Martin). But the point is that, in my experience, the best support comes
from the community of folks that use the same product. And this community
(WO) periodically wrings its hands over things like licensing of WO, whether
it will go open source, cross platform support and so on.

<wonders>Would these issues be permanently resolved if WO was
open-sourced?</wonders> WIll never happen - too much gold there...

Geoff


On 16/03/06, Cephalo Podus <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi Geoff,
>
> 2006/3/15, Geoff Hopson <[email protected]>:
> > Anyway, this post appeared on the
> > RoR mailing list from an ex-WO developer. I thought it made interesting
> > reading,
>
> Yeah, that was fun. Just a few remarks here:
>
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Michael Engelhart <[email protected] >
>
> > from a desire to develop something that was
> > "like" WebObjects because at the time there was a lot of uncertainty
> around
> > the fate of WebObjects and I was also concerned that the community was
> so
> > small I felt it would be hard to find skilled developers as we grew.
>
> Same old, same old... some people worry too much instead of getting
> the job done. "We need something like WebObjects, but not quite WO
> because of the uncertainty..." - they certainly mean the uncertainty
> that is only felt by the people who spread it and help spread it like
> Mr. Engelhart.
>
> > WebObjects, in my opinion is the best Java based tool for building
> database
> > driven sites but I couldn't risk using it since it was very poorly
> supported
> > by Apple at the time.
>
> IMHO the question is if there is _any_ open source solution out there
> that can *promise* more support - that's ridiculous, the main argument
> against using open source has always been the lack of support. Just
> take a look at sourceforge, there are loads of dead projects whose
> code hasn't been touched for years or who have remained in the
> "planning" state for much too long.
>
> > Tapestry is a very complex MVC framework that had some points that were
> > similar to WebObjects but
>
> ... so he switched to Tapestry and Hibernate and was unhappy...
>
> > Time after time when
> > researching something in the forums I came to the conclusion that core
> > developers were the most arrogant SOB's I'd ever come across.
>
> Yeah, open source support is so much better, don't you think, Mr.
> Engelhart?
>
> > So after 4-5 months of this, Ruby on Rails came to my attention as the
> news
> > surrounding it increased.
>
> So let's jump onto the next bandwagon...
>
> > But after seeing the video,
>
> I, too, always change development tools after watching a video ;-)
>
> > so I put in front of my
> > team an option to take 2 weeks off from further Java development to
> attempt
> > a port of our 25,000 lines of code to Rails
>
> Do these people live on welfare or do they receive any kind of
> subsidies from the government so that they are able to waste two weeks
> on trying out a new environment and port their app? Normal companies
> have work to do and projects to finish in order to _make_money_.
> Normal companies are pretty focused on making money and also very
> focused on the core competence surrounding their development
> environment.
>
> > At the end of the day, the risk that we took has paid off in spades.  My
> > team is happy at work every day and we are pumping out more code and
> > features then I ever could have imagined was possible with such a small
> > team.
>
> ...after losing two weeks while playing around. How productive could
> the same team have been had they stayed with WO and not wasted those
> weeks (add their Tapestry / Hibernate experiments to that...)
>
> > But under a
> > more realistic heavy load situation of 5 simultaneuous users we are
> seeing
> > 200-300 ms response times.
>
> So 5 simultaneous users are considered heavy load these days? *Giggle*
>
> Ceph
>

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