I’m suffering from framework overload. It seems you can’t turn around without encountering another tech project with delusions of grandeur, feeling the need to write the next big, all-encompassing, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink framework, with as many bells and whistles as is possible to throw in… oh yes, and we’ll just forget about a few of the fundamentals on the way, if you don’t mind.

I suspect I’m about to reveal that I’m dreadfully old-fashioned, and therefore, terribly unfashionable — but I don’t see that I’m any better off ‘post’-framework, than I was ‘pre’-framework. One spends so much time trying to work around the framework to accomplish something that should have been easy (but has been left out, or is done in a way that is somewhat less than elegant), that any productivity gains are lost in the noise.

Personal bugbear at the moment: JSF. This was, and is, a ghastly idea (why not insult half the Java world in one fell swoop… . What’s a method of building software worse than design-by-committee? Design-by-reaction; playing catch-up to movement in the ‘other camp’. It’s hard to believe that something initiated in 2001 could still be so abysmally bad, and yet, 5 years on… surprise!!! It is!

Facelets dull the pain somewhat, but the facelet documentation is so short of being really useful (and so damn trite) it’s beyond a joke… and for god’s sake get rid of the adverblurb on the front page…

facelets for JSF now has over 70 THOUSAND hits on Google

…who gives a damn?

Only a screen or so into my usage of facelets, and I’d already hit enough brick walls to give a rhinocerous a headache, with very little in the way of analgesic document relief. Much vaunted google search didn’t help a lot either. Got where I wanted to be in the end, but there was considerable cursing on the way.

Bill Venners quoted Keith Braithwaite recently, and while he’s talking about DSLs in particular, I think this is a brilliant summation of my feelings about frameworks in general:

This is symptomatic of one way in which the industry has decayed. The message of Smalltalk (and Lisp) is that the route to productivity is to use simple tools with few features and allow everyone interested to build upon them. The favoured route at the moment is to encode every good idea into an all-singing all-dancing “solution”, take it or leave it.

I’m not quite convinced of an industry-wide decay, considering I think there’s plenty of simple tools available for most platforms that would satisfy his criteria, but there’s more than enough framework verbiage flying around to last the remainder of the century.