lixo.org

So here’s my little war story for Cameron’s XML Abuse Contest. I’m sure Sam Ruby has quite a few as well, and people like him - who work closer to the WS-* hell - will win this contest, as clearly denoted by his brilliant and disturbing “Reality is Corrosive”.

I’ll throw in my two pennies anyway. Couple of years ago I was working at the second largest mobile telecom company in Sao Paulo, and we had a project with pretty much all the symptoms of a horrible catastrophe: large team, no crystal clear goal, no QA, shoddy source control system, poor choices of tools, and one of our missions was to integrate BEA Tuxedo with enough EJBs to invade a middle-eastern country with.

So the project leads, in all their wisdom, thought it would be a good idea to teach us a lesson by bringing XMLink to the table, thus completing our fabulous toolset with this marvel of modern software engineering and buzzword compliance.

The team went on a coding rampage for a couple of months. No deployment was ever made during that period, and no full build was attempted. I’m not blaming XMLink for all of the chaos that ensued, but this is an XML abuse story, so I should focus on it a bit.

I barely remember the details, and I’m just too weak to look at its documentation again, but basically we were using it to transfer data in and out largely bloated Tuxedo calls. You know, the typical stored-procedure-like thing. XMLink creates this huge XML message for each call, each parameter and each return, which is perfectly acceptable if your point-of-sale system can bear a 10 seconds-per-call until the transformations and byte-chewing occur. Put Websphere 4.0.1 (this was 2002) on top of it, on a subdimensioned hardware architecture, sit back and watch the fireworks.

Luckily, the project was canned before it was ever built, and I left the gig for some sanity - which took me a while to find again.

Just had dinner with The Other American President at the indian place off Marble Arch / Oxford Street.

A really nice dinner, I have to say, even when our main topics were stress, the IT market’s suicide in the attempt to stop Microsoft and its further inevitable and impending doom, leading to crap buggy code, crap ridiculously large bloated relatively bug-free code, and then some more sad things.

Ok, horrible example, but pick a company that has some sort of business model on top of Open Source, like, say - and I told you this was a bad example - JBoss. They apparently own 37% of the J2EE Application Server market, if I read TSS correctly (despite having lost the link and being fairly tired by now). And they’ve got around 30 to 50 employees…

Isn’t there something wrong with this? I mean, you would’ve thought that a company that owned 37% of a market where there’s a f*ckload of cash flowing around like mad would be able to grow larger, presuming that the basic intent of every company is to grow. And I’m sure it is growing, but, still, there’s something fishy in this picture. Are they doing better than BEA? Certainly, in market share terms, but in terms of pocket depth, I would disagree.

I don’t mean this to say that JBoss is taking jobs out of the BEAs and IBMs around, I mean that we all are, as an industry, giving more and more of our products and services away for free. Sure, there’s a lot of potential business models there, and I’m sure Bob at OpenXource is the right person to talk to if you’re interested, but I’m still wondering why we are deliberately rushing out to produce free and open source products, mostly to provide an alternative or to beat Big Evil Companies, and if we’re not thinking about the whole industry while at it.

We’re making ourselves redundant, in a sense. Which is actually a good thing. We’ll have to move on to more interesting problems. Why would that be bad?

The WordPress installation process was really so painless and took so little I would actually expect something to go wrong. Ok, yeah, it did - there’s a change to make if you’re using PHP 5.

Then, I tried getting Flickr’s Blog This button to work, and lo and behold, it did… while posting HTML-encoded entities, thus generating posts that weren’t really too good to look at, unless you’re a webdesigner with a strange fetiche.

To correct this, all you need to do if you’re running WordPress 1.2.2 is to go to xmlrpc.php and change line 1287 from:

$post_content = format_to_post( $contentstruct[ 'description' ] );

To this:

$post_content = format_to_post( html_entity_decode( $contentstruct[ 'description' ] ) );

This tells the XML-RPC thingie to unencode the actual post content, and you’re done. Yay!

If anyone is aware of any problems that might cause, please let me know, but so far it works perfectly.

Hey there, and welcome to my new weblog. I got tired of keeping two separate blogs - the one at JRoller , in English, and the other one at JavaBlogs.com.br (host down more often than not, so don’t worry if you can’t go there just yet).

So I’m starting this new blog consolidating the two. It also has its own domain name, a short and cute one. That is, if you don’t speak Portuguese. In this case, it means “rubbish”. But I find it cute, anyway, and it sort of communicates the intent of this blog, which is to be more of a dumping ground of ideas than actual thoughtfully elaborate articles, essays, or whatever. The posts here should not take much more than a minute to read, so you should be able to go through them quite easily, and I should be able to post more often, even though I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

I’ll be changing all sorts of things during the next few days, so don’t link to this site just yet - I should mess around with the permalinks and layouts and all the stuff that can break those.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how to get Flickr to work perfectly with WordPress 1.2.2, there’s a one-line change you need to do in order to get the post to show up correctly, instead of the encoded XHTML source. I’ll detail it later.

Cheers everyone!