2002-02-23 22 February 2002
trackback__The Open Socity and its Enemies__
Appeal for an open society
Disarming the markets
Sun has great success at Olympics
I was at a reboot reboot yesterday. It was held at United Spaces, and the purpose was to brainstorm reboot5.0 using the open space meeting format. Open space is pretty cool, and it is surprisingly efficient at reaching good ideas and conclusions.
At the school party the same night I tried to explain open space to Julie (no, not that Julie), our half-drunk student council president, and she was hugely enthusiastic. (Later that evening she got the run-down on the IB Diploma composition and grade calculation formulas, and she was also enthusiastic about that. 
)
__The J2EE Journey__
Understanding J2EE is extremely difficult. I feel like I’m being introduced to a whole new world. Aggressive caching, CMP, distributed components, read-committed isolation, message queuing, directories, distributed transactions, transaction managers, connectors â these are all things that I’ve been spared for in my nice cozy little AOLserver/Oracle 2-tier world. On the other hand, there is something uniquely comforting with this omnipotent architecture astronautry.
I am beginning to accept that the model with one big Fire 15K running Oracle and an infinite number of webservers will perhaps not scale to the nth. It appears that only Philip Greenspun believes in having Oracle only handle caching and concurrency control:
Generally, I don’t think you’ll find many big websites today that don’t do some kind of caching in front of the relational database. I don’t know what AOLserver looks like today, but I know that Phil Greenspun used to advocate leaving everything (caching, concurrency control) to the RDBMS. Well, he also used to say that the only serious database solution was Oracle running on some HP/UX fridge-sized server, which is not an option for many people (accidentally, we are running Helma applications with Oracle on HP/UX on a fridge-sized server, but if we didn’t use object caching in the application servers (which are Intel/Linux servers), we’d probably need ten of them instead of two. (Hannes)
I guess Hannes’s conclusion is that the logic-only-in-Oracle will scale, but more expensively than having middleware.
How does all of this apply to buyingexperience? We’re not a technology company per se, but I think we would like our solutions to be platform dependent, scalable and cheap. (I suspect the J2EE complexity problem is efficiently solved by aggressive source code generation and the best tools in the universe.)
Read Middleware Heaven vs. Middleware Hell.
I have of course been raised to distrust middleware and architecture astronauts, but some of the descriptions of the world (especially the monkeys part) I find very accurate. Coders are expensive, and if we can farm off work to primates in St. Petersburg, wouldn’t that help our bottom line?
Does CMP save time?
Is J2EE platform and database independence real?
Is unit testing useful?
There are lots of alternatives to the full J2EE packages, a lot of them much simpler. I’ve ranted about The Hop in the past, but after the ArsDigita debacle I’m growing more and more suspicious of any tools that are not 100% standard. J2EE has multiple implementations. .NET and friends (even PHP) do not.
Complex business problems have been solved using J2EE in the real world. The solutions scale.
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