On the importance of avoiding success... to have enduring success; The J2EE case

There was a time -at the beginning- in which Java was an interesting language.  It was possible to download the libraries at run time. It was a C++ for internet.  There were things like ObjectSpace Voyager, that fifteen years ago embraced cloud computing (agent computing at that time) with movable code across the internet.

But shortly after, Java  was hijacked by  maniacs of databases and database-centric developments. That crap called J2EE was born, with their Cobol-istic names and their unnecessary complications of dependency injection, their clustering by manual configuration and by their infinite chains of beans repeating essentially the same code, in endless communications by RMI to the host next to it in the LAN to read a simple register of the database. That poor copy of Microsoft DNA has dominated java development in the enterprise until today.   In the meantime, other standard for web programming, web services and so on,  big, complicated and with lack of innovation  have been developed under the Java platform.

All these business problems that J2EE tried to solve, could have been solved with ObjectSpace Vogager with a tenth of the code and with a fraction of the infrastructure necessary under that J2EE gold fever, but the businessmen and the innovators where in the hands of Software development departments, and both could not communicate. The software departments seek power and size, and that means bloated code, a lot of subcontracted people, buzzwords and a platform with which any mediocrity could call himself a "guru" or an "architect", and legions of configurators, maintainers, prescriptors and so on. And that was generously given by J2EE.

I´m developing clustering and fail-over functionalities for MFlow using cloud haskell. And immediately I remembered that precious gem that was ObjectSpace Voyager. It was an agent-based java platform that was unbelievably powerful... except that  it did not worshiped SQL databases.  And  these are the few references that I got.  I notices that his creator, Graham Glass, resigned as CEO and  chief developer of the company at the peak of the popularity when the short-term oriented people in his company voted to join the B2B bandwagon -that was in fashion at that time- instead of continuing ObjectSpace as a company devoted to develop a general network business platform. The company went bankrupt the next year.

The rest is history. Sun created the J2EE crap. BEA-Weblogic made a lot of money selling his crap J2EE Application server to software departments willing to eat money and resources from the rest of the company, SUN did the same with their overpriced servers.... And finally all of this went where it belonged from the beginning: to the One that J2EE and development deparments worshipped: the SQL database. Oracle took over.

Oracle will go to death.  And that will be the end of that nightmarish cultic gnostic religion.

Let's start again, but learning the lessons from the past