Whatever Happened to Programming?

Mike Taylor wrote two insightful essays about programming a few days ago. Are we stuck in a tedious loop of gluing APIs together? What happened to the creative aspects of programming?

Whatever happened to programming part 1 talks about how the most enjoyable part of a new project occurs early on, when things are just taking shape and the most creative effort takes place. Whatever happened to programming redux is a response to many comments he received so far, with more insightful commentary.

I don’t think libraries or frameworks are boring to use. Actually I find some of them quite insightful and fun to use. Comparing to the old days (for me that was early 1990’s) when I had to spend time writing our own C libraries to implement data structures or do network communications, now I have heaps more than what I will ever need built-in in JRE or .NET or even ActionScript. The upside of these libraries are quality and productivity. The main complaint I have about frameworks is that it can limit your choice – see my gripe about GAE.

I have said before that the IT industry is modelled after real engineering disciplines like built environment. In built environment, when you want to build a house you will have different people with different expertise in their own area to be involved from concept to design to build and test. When an engineer looks at a design, he/she will choose the materials and the trades people will actually ‘glue’ them together. As a builder, you will not expect to make your own glass, bake your own bricks and tiles, grow your own grass, etc. All are readily available for you to pick and choose and ‘glue’ together.

Sure, if you are stranded on a deserted island you will have to start from raw materials to make tools and build simple structures assuming you know (or can teach yourself) how. But that does not have the quality and productivity that are required in a normal environment. Another big driving factor is that  for most of us who write commercial applications (not tool smith) we need to serve a business need. IT does not exist without a business diver. In some cases, I felt bored about the frameworks that have been chosen by the company. That is why I do a lot of playing after work

Not Happy, GAE!

Cloud Computing has been a latest buzz word recently and seemingly will be for the foreseeable future. I had registered for Google App Engine (GAE) a while ago but did not do anything with it until last week.

I downloaded the Google Plugin for Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) and installed it without any problem. I then decided to port one of my web applications written in ZK 3.6.2 with Spring Security 3.0.2 in its simplest form.

I started by creating a GAE application in Eclipse using the Google plugin’s wizard. I then copied WebContent directory from my source project to the war directory of the target GAE project. I modified the deployment descriptors according to instructions from ZK small talk with the following additions:

1. appengine-web.xml – I added /**.xml in the static file exclude path list since in my application I generate .xml files to feed them to the XML/SwfGauge package.
2. applicationContext-security.xml – the Spring Security deployment descriptor. I had to add a URL pattern for “/” explicitly due to the different way of handling it by Tomcat (the server I used for developing the web app) and Jetty (the server bundled in Google Plugin).

The modified application then ran quite successfully as GAE application in Eclipse. Of course, anything that involves creating user thread were disallowed and any Java packages/classes that were not supported by GAE were also not allowed. I thought I could work around those problems later.

Then I deployed the application to the real GAE. The deployment process was error free. I was overjoyed and clicked on the URL for my application on the appspot.com. A HTTP 500 – Server error was returned without any explanation.  I did a little fiddling and my first page was displayed if I remove Spring Security, but then all my included pages (I store all my pages in WEB-INF/pages directory) were not shown… I would need at least a few dozen of trial and error before I can pin-point the problem but my internet connection quota is running out fast! So I will call it quits for now.

While cloud computing gives you great promises it is also a shackle and limits your freedom of choice . Although GAE seems to be compatible with many frameworks, the degree of compatibility varies. For example, in the list ZK framework is COMPATIBLE with GAE, but if you look at all the features and packages that are included in ZK you will quickly realise that it is not true – server push requires separate thread and so does jFreeChart and some other bundled packages; captcha uses java.awt.Font (which is not allowed in GAE)… So you’d be better off sticking with GAE’s recommended technology stack – servlet/JSP/JSF + JPA/JDO + JAXB + XML, etc.  This may be OK for new applications but presents a big obstacle for existing large applications which heavily rely on other frameworks.