This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Weiqi Gao. Original Post: Ted Neward: Rethinking Enterprise (at StLJUG) Feed Title: Weiqi Gao's Weblog Feed URL: http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/rss.xml Feed Description: Sharing My Experience... Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Weiqi Gao Latest Posts From Weiqi Gao's Weblog

I tweeted:

St. Louis JUG is about to start.@tedneward will talk about Enterprise Java.

as I headed to the St. Louis JUG Thursday evening.

He talked no such thing. What Ted did present is this fascinating critique of the psyche of the proverbial "Enterprise" developer who's always seeking "Best Practices."

As is typical of Ted Neward, his insight is both stinging and profound, along the lines of "They made you all stupid... that's why you bite into the EJB hype-wave so hard."

Well, he's presentation is much more nuanced than I could replicate here. Fortunately, Ted is gracious in providing the slides of the presentation for the St. Louis JUG website. I'll let you review the slides in the link below and draw your own conclusions:

More than 70 people attended the meeting. That almost doubled the normal attendance. As I have blogged many times before, you have to be there to experience it. The slides tell only half of the story. In what follows, I'll try to convey some of the ambience of the presentation.

Just as he is to begin his presentation, Ted decided to reboot his laptop, which brought on the Windows "Please wait as I install some new software, it's 1% done for Stage 2, oh, and don't turn off your computer" behavior. You couldn't believe how long that took. And while I watched the progress bar progress slowly, I kept thinking about my traumatic experience with Windows Updates where the progress bar did went backwards once it reached the end of Stage 3, voiding the whole update. Fortunately that was not the case last week.

As Ted pointed his finger at the audience and said, "You all bought into the EJB hype, didn't you?" I kept thinking, "Not all of us. There are people in the audience who did not and said so publicly and forcefully."

EJB is only an example that Ted used to illustrate the tendency for the developers (and architects) to fall victim to the accepting the hype without critical evaluations. He also mentioned Node, NoSQL, and the Cloud, as some of the current hypes whose adoption requires critical thinking. I think people should heed his advice and evaluate these critically. And yes, I remember the time decades ago when a fresh programmer proclaimed that we should write all of our applications for the Network Computer.

"Is your enterprise architecture box-stick-box-stick-cylinder?" asked Ted at one time, referring to the standard three-tier architected applications.

When Ted asked for people who can solve the geometry problem on slide 6, I almost raised my hand I had solved many such problems while I was in high school. But I didn't because I did not have the proof ready before he turned the slide. For the rest of the talk, half of my brain was paying attention to the talk, the other half tried to find a proof. And indeed it is simple. Here goes:

Proof. Extend BD to meet AC at point E. Then
AC + CB = AE + EC + CB
    > AE + EB
    = AE + ED + DC
    > AD + DC
Here the inequalities EC + CB > EB and AE + ED > AD follow from the theorem that the sum of two sides of a triangle is greater than the third side.
QED

The presentation ended with an answer and an imperative. The answer is pessimistic and not one that satisfies. The imperative is optimistic and the only way to restore confidence in the developer profession.

Are we up to the task? Only if we, everyone of us, think for ourselves!