Why Eclipse Is Pointing At Your Big Toe

Rob Williams complains that Eclipse plugins suck. Unfortunately he is right. Most plugins (and that includes some projects hosted at eclipse.org) don't come anywhere near the quality of the Eclipse SDK. Rob asks in a comment why the unwashed masses of plugin developers are allowed to shoot themselves (and the whole Eclipse install) in the foot. As usual, it seemed like a good idea at the time (an still may be).
One of the basic tenets of eclipse development is that there are no privileged clients. The idea at the time was to migrate all IBM dev tools onto a common platform. This would include web tools, c, cobol, you name it. It should be possible to write a state of the art tool for all these problem domains. At the same time, the platform should allow for all these tools to seamlessly integrate into the same workbench. It was felt that the platform would only end up with the appropriate degrees of freedom if the developers of the Eclipse SDK would themselves have to live by the same rules as all the "third party" plugin writers (a practice called "eating your own dogfood"). That meant that if the JDT or the update manager or whatever SDK plugin could plug in some functionality into the workbench, anybody else could do so, too. Voila a whole bunch of loaded guns conveniently pointed at your foot ;-)

Visitors Not Welcome

The Register carries this story today. Am I the only one offended by this? Oh well, I'll just not visit!

Why does JSF use JSP

I've been looking into JSF these last days. What I don't get about it is why they use JSP to create the component tree? If you write an internationalized application, you end up with zero, zip, kein HTML on your page. At that point, wouldn't we be better off just building the component tree in Java, with nice things like code assist and static type checks? Or am I just missing something here?

log4j must die!

Arghh, stuck in log4j hell once again:

log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.

I would, if this fucking piece of shit actually told me any useful information, like where it was trying to load the configuration from.