Karl Brodowsky's IT-Blog

This is another story of a project, that did not go as well as it could have gone while I was there. From unsuccessful projects we can learn a lot, so there will be stories like this once in a while. The first one was about Tom Rocket.

Tim Finnerty

It was the time, when all the cool companies tried to introduce Java. And some of the new Java projects failed, causing the companies to go back to C, which again scared other companies from doing this step. But some companies did not get scared by this. They embraced the new Java-fashion at a time when it still was not clear whether or not this was a good idea. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, in those days the experienced guys did not want to move to Java. It was slow, it was unreliable, not mature,… Maybe for Applets, maybe more generally for GUIs to get rid of VisualBasic, but Java on the server was considered a bad joke. For the server real people used real C, of course on Unix or maybe Linux, which was not really such a bad idea in those days. But there were the young people. Or the ones who had stayed young. They often just had finished their education and firmly believed that by just using technology „xyz“ everything would become great. xyz can be a development method (spiral model in those days, agile today), an architecture (microservices), a paragdigm („OO“, „functional“), a framework („enterprise edition“), a tool or a programming language (yeah, Java).. Often this first enthusiasm ends in a disaster: The money has been spent, the developers are leaving and the software is further away from being useful than anybody would like to admit. In lucky cases there is still some money left to do it right. Maybe even to do it right in Java.

That is were we are coming in. I do not really know the earlier history, but according to the management it was a total disaster. Now Tim Finnerty (real name known to the author) was the new technical lead, team architect or whatever this role is called. He embraced the new technology, but promised to not overstrech it. A bit of old school. Sounds good, because it is exactly what managers want to hear. No more risky experiements, but this time it needs to become a success.

So Tim Finnerty defined, how we had to work. He knew Java, he knew databases and especially Oracle, he knew the web, he even knew Perl. And he knew OO. Better than anybody else, so we did the real thing. Great head start. And everybody had to program according to Tim’s rules.

Of course we were using Java enterprise edition. That meant, that we were programming against some Weblogic application server, that was hard to install, hard to run, required a few minutes of startup time for each minor change of the software that we were writing and forced to a very archaic and primitive programming model. But that was cool and it was the future, which unfortunately proved to be true. Even though it has at least become usable by now. So far nothing to blame on Tim, because it is kind of the stack that everybody used.

Now to the OO and the database. Each database table represented a „Business Object“, with a name like XyzBO. So most of the time, we wrote a class XyzBO plus a few more to fulfill the greed and need for boilerplate code of the old J2EE-world. XyzBO was a enterprise java bean. A stateless session bean, to be accurate. Which meant, that we wrote methods of this EJB, which were basically procedures of the pre-OO-world. But within we could of course use the whole OO-toolset. Which we did. So the class to represent any data from the database was actually called Data. It was a minor subset of the standard Perl data structures, which meant that Data was a list of hash maps, which could behave just like a hash map if it had only one entry. Database queries returned Data, or of course null, if nothing was found. Nobody would ever want to use an empty collection. Pretty much the opposite of what we are now doing the hard way by introducing Optional or Option to avoid the null. But it was easy to just write
if (data == null) { data = new Data(); }
at least for the ones who new this trick.
So data resembled the content of the database or of the query result, with the column names as keys and the values as objects. When working with these, it was really easy. Just know the attribute name accurately. Get the value from data. See if it is null. If not, cast it to the real type, and voila….

The database was designed according to Tim’s advice, he had to review every table. It was mandatory to have as unique key and as first column a string of around 700 characters, which was called HANDLE. Each table had a business primary key, which was always consisting of several columns. Because the system allowed multiple instances of the software to run on the same database, there was always one column called „SITE“ in this logical primary key. But there were no primary keys defined in the database. The unique HANDLE was enough. It contained the name of the BO, like XyzBO, followed by a colon and followed by the concatenation of all the logical primary keys, separated with commas. The date had to be converted to a string using a local US format, not ISO, of course. All foreign keys were defined using HANDLE. In the end more than half of the DB space was wasted for this stupidity. But each single handle value started with an XyzBO:, to remind us that we were programming OO.

And now booleans. It was forbidden to use the boolean type of Java. All booleans were strings containing the words „true“ and „false“. This went like that all the way to the web interface.

At that time web frameworks did not yet exist or were at least unknown. So the way to go was to write JSPs, which contained kind of dynamic web pages and to write servlets to control the flow and access the EJBs. Now according to Tim it was too hard to learn servlets as well, so it was forbidden to use them and instead a connection-JSP had to be written, which did not display anything, but only contained a <% in the beginning and a %> in the end and the code between.

A lot of small and larger stupidities, that were forced on the team. Most people were new to Java and to OO and did not even realize that there was anything wrong, apart from the fact, that it was kind of hard to get stuff done. Some stupidities were due to the fact that the early J2EE really sucked, but mostly it was Tim, who forced everyone to his level. This story happened a long time ago. Tim has already retired. I would say he is one of the guys, who retire as a Junior.

There is (almost) nothing wrong with stupidity. And there is (almost) nothing with arrogance. But the combination really sucks. Especially if it it taken serious by the manager or has to be taken serious by the team.