A recurring theme here is the general malaise of the enterprise software development space being beseiged by warring factions, religious arguments, and petty bickering -- leading to lots of reinvention, duplication of effort, and piles of hubris. It seems like a significant part of the industry has gone "meta" and just wants to build tooling, and doesn't seem to want to get any real work done with the exiting tooling. Whereas a lot of people are very happy with .NET 2.0 and J2EE 1.4 w/ Spring, Hibernate, and Struts. And lots are also happy with the proprietary "up-stack" products from IBM, BEA, and Oracle such as their integration and portal severs. WebLogic Portal, for example, is BEA's hottest selling product, though if you read the pundits in the blogosphere you'd think portals were passe'.
Anyway, I think there is a general need to agree on some core principles and guidance of how to build robust and performing enterprise software, regardless of your chosen religion. Thankfully, it looks like I'm not the only one.... later this week I'm heading to London UK to attend an architect's summit, organized by a few technology thought leaders -- Rod Johnson, from Interface21, Steve Ross-Talbot from the W3C, Alexis Richardson from Monadic & MetaLogic, Floyd Marinescu from TheServerSide.com and John Davies from C24. Around 30 tech architects are expected to attend from across the globe, to discuss practical guidance on building distributed enterprise systems.
Hopefully we'll come to some kind of agreement on a roadmap or manifesto. Stay tuned....
