Java getting swallowed up in the Great Simplification

Submitted by noel.a on Thu, 01/14/2010 - 17:32.

原文地址： http://www.javaworld.com/community/?q=node/3925
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I hope that commentor noel.a doesn't mind if I quote from his or her great comment on my post from yesterday:

Abstraction tools bear some of the responsibility for the sorry state of "Enterprise." The prevailing idea is that we should not care about the mountain of artifacts we generate, or the details of deployment assemblies. Let the application server and affiliated tools worry about that. XML everywhere; declarative constructs and executable code corroborating in various arcane relationships and correspondences documented across several specifications, or out-of-date open source project web site links, or not documented at all.

Well, we should care about the artifacts we create. We should know in a complete and cohesive way what each does, how everything fits together. And by 'we', I mean the humans, not their XML editors. Certification is almost meaningless. It has a sell-by date. We make up new ways to add garbage to the Enterprise regularly.

Enterprise "engineering" is antithetical to computer science. Too much preoccupation with the pragmatism of tools, not enough insistence on principles. You're not supposed to hide what you don't understand. You're not supposed to "blackbox" complexity.

This is definitely an attitude for which I have a great deal of sympathy! I'm suspicious of WYSIWIG editors and promises to take the programming out of programming. But it seems that the whole history of computing is a series of new abstraction layers. After all, vaguely human-readable programming languages like Java are just layers on top of assembly language, which in turn is just a cheat so that you don't have to deal with individual bits. My big-picture take is that the number of people we need to feed and care for computer systems just can't grow as quickly as the number of computer systems that need care and feeding. The result is lots of Enterprise-y systems that sort of work most of the time while being run by people who don't wholly understand them. Even JVM languages that are supposedly easier to write than Java represent the same trend; sure, you don't know what's going on under the hood so the performance is worse, but you can knock the code out much more quickly! (Of course, this is what old C++ hands said about Java.)

Another acquisition that happened this week seems to pointing in this direction. VMware -- which, relevant to Java developers, bought SpringSource last summer -- just purchased Zimbra, a division of Yahoo! that provides calendaring and email services. I'd urge you to read the blog post from VMware CTO Steve Herrod on the acquisition. His vision, if I'm reading it right, is to offer a giant virtual blob of functionality (with a catchy name like "VMware vCloud") that will do all sorts of things for you that you won't have to. It will provide an OS for your applications to run. It will provide Java utility infrastructure so that the only Java code you'll have to write will be directly related to your business logic. It will provide a ready-made email and calendar server. You don't really have to understand how any of it works, really. You don't even need a physical computer to run it on, or to know where the physical computer it's running on is.

And that's all great -- until something goes wrong. And then what?