jutopia

Facebook. The future of internet. How high hopes we had. What silly amounts of money Microsoft spent.It was such a great idea. One community to rule them all and anyone can extend it with their own apps.But as always, a platform is nothing without it’s killer app. All Facebook got was a couple of stupid movie quiz and dating apps.I still think it’s a great idea in principle but the implementation has to be:

• Decentralized.
• Based on “webby” standards.

I’m thinking whoever puts together things like OpenID, hFN, hCard, plain old email and makes it work for my grand mother is on a winner.Facebook on the other hand, I have one word for you: Unsubscribe.

Could not have said it better myself:

“What do you think we should do about SOA?” Which weirdly, nobody had asked me before, and I could find only one answer: “Don’t do anything. ‘SOA’ may have meant something once but it’s just vendor bullshit now.”

Tim Bray

SOA did show some promise for a short while before it got sniped by the vendors. It was a simpler technology stack, it had more industry backing, it was decentralised and it was based on the foundation of one of the few really successful large scale distributed systems (the web). Unfortunately there’s very little left of any of that after the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Tibco had their go at it.

Meanwhile in a galaxy far far away some people are showing what you can really do with services if you just cut out the crap.

The future looks bright but this particular three-letter acronym is not likely to be part of it.

The other day I needed to go through some design of my current project with another team, so I naively thought: This UML thing was all the rage 10 years ago and even if it didn’t work at all back then they must surely have gotten their act together since then. So I should be able to just download some tool and with a quick flick of the wrist spit out beautiful UML diagrams by the dozen from my exquisitely crafted and factored domain model.

Not quite…

Many hours later and around 10 dysfunctional tools discarded I realize the terrible truth: all UML tools suck! Either the installer crashes (!), the GUI just won’t launch, the IntelliJ plugin just doesn’t work or the reverse-engineering crashes producing nothing at all.

I mean, come on, how hard can it be! Wasn’t the whole point of UML and up-front design and all that jazz supposed to create higher quality software? In these days of actually pretty good software (even Windows is kinda functional) the only category of software that consistently suck are the very tools that supposedly should be used to design high quality software.

The irony.