Thursday, June 03, 2004

corporate bloatware, nominal equivalents

I am about to throw in the towel on IBM/Rational XDE once again. I like software engineering and acknowledge the importance of UML in OOD, and all the power that XDE can offer a developer (two-way synchronization between model and generated code is a big plus). But, the experience of using XDE has been unpleasant for the most part. The first time I tried to use it it would die randomly, and leave zombies running (complete with truncated 6~1.3 filenames in the process list). That Eclipse sits at the core is some encouragement, but the tool suffers from every flaw that identifies corporate bloatware. It's huge and complex, and is not quite intuitive straight out of the box. There's a complete lack of useful and current documentation (tutorials, even if they are discovered deep down in the cavernous set of hyperlinked files, are out of date). Dialog boxes fail to pop up, and some features no longer exist (that you cannot apply the Core J2EE Patterns anymore is a huge minus). First your company (there's no way a sane individual would shell out so many $$$ for this, is there?) drops a Godzilla poopload of money to purchase this chaotic piece of inflateware. Then you have to pay for documentation. And training. And even then there always the sense of missing out on something. I might lean more towards building up a development infrastructure from smaller components. Gives you a sense of plug n' play, and does not leave you locked into the tool. Oh, and did I mention that the codebase reveals a hotchy potchy marriage of Java and COM Automation. Talk about completely tying you down. I hope they use "Iron Maiden" as the codename for the next release.

My Japanese name is Gennosuke Chikamatsu.
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