First things first: “Thank you, RedHat.” Mum taught me to be polite. See, Mum, see :-)
This was a “Red Hat Briefing Session where you will learn about the newly launched JBoss Open Choice – Red Hat’s strategy for simple, standard & flexible Java solutions.”
The main message of the first session was: the industry wants simple; tomcat is enough. JBoss is responding to this demand.
Even the presenter ([the slightly tired-looking] Ms. Ivetta Kleinman, JBoss Solutions Architect) didn’t seem at all impressed.
I agree with her advice: a cut-down server may seem like a good idea now but a bit of thinking about the future can be beneficial.
Lots of point solutions tend to end up inflicting death by a thousand puncture wounds.
I have been into plenty of sites that seemed to think that they can build a better JMS/Hibernate/SOA stack/SOAP framework/CORBA ORB/… than anyone else (and didn’t need no stinkin’ sub-optimal solution from someone “who knows nothing about our special needs”) and eventually a) find out that that wasn’t really the case, b) find that their home-grown, beautifully ‘architected’ system is now an increasingly expensive liability, c) find their architects have got bored and moved on to greener (and still innocent) fields, and d) can’t find anyone willing to kill off their career by working with it.
Evidently, the industry still isn’t mature.
The second part of the event was devoted to Ross Hall, Architect at Suncorp Personal Insurance. He gave a strong presentation saying how happy he was with JBoss Rules. I was glad to see someone actively pushing the idea that rules can be extracted/abstracted away from messy tangles of inline code.
He introduced Drools Advisor, a tool that they had developed to make creating form-based, rules-driven user interfaces easier.
This interested me: I had previously been involved in supporting an application whose sole raison-d’etre was to validate operator-input data against a schema [of sorts] to ensure consistency and correctness with respect to a myriad of conditions, exceptional circumstances, resource constraints, and so on. Partly driven by a groaning, bug-ridden and awfully messy database structure, a rewrite had become painfully necessary. I proposed adopting a rules engine, only to be told (by the lead maintainer) that “there are no rules in this system.” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t convince The Powers That Be that a mass of SQL stored procedures, Delphi-based “Business Objects” and UI validation constituted/contained a set of ‘rules’.
Wisdom is knowing that “you can take a horse to water, but you can’t herd cats.” Or something. I’m not wise enough yet, I guess.
Wish I’d have Drools Advisor when I was engaged in battling the “unenlightened dark forces”…having a pretty demo around would have helped heaps.
