WAT? This hilarious talk about the incredible quirks of JavaScript had been going around on Twitter and other media. In case you haven’t already, take a look at it here:
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
Speaking of WAT, let’s talk about Spring Security. Spring has undertaken great effort to replace the clumsy, verbose parts of J2EE to replace them with straightforward and intuitive APIs. In Spring Security, you will find great features like the eraseCredentialsAfterAuthentication property, which keeps you from accidentally letting credentials lie around. Accidentally. What, like printing them to the standard out, or to the HTML document?? If this happens to you accidentally, then you might have a lot of other problems, too. Frameworks helping people to avoid such accidents remind me of PHP and this interesting post about how fundamentally broken PHP is:
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
If you’ve ever heard about PHP’s abominable “magic quotes”, you’ll understand what I mean.
More examples
There’s more. Spring has incredibly specialised API types, such as:
J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSourcePreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesWebAuthenticationDetailsPreAuthenticatedGrantedAuthoritiesAuthenticationDetailsGrantedAuthorityFromAssertionAttributesUserDetailsServiceMutableGrantedAuthoritiesContainerMethodSecurityMetadataSourceBeanDefinitionParserAbstractUserDetailsServiceBeanDefinitionParser
Wow. I didn’t know Java identifiers were even allowed to be that long. And there’s more. Consider the package names (line break introduced artificially for improved readability):
org.springframework.security.web .authentication.preauth.websphere .WebSpherePreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource
Note the repetition of concepts in both package and class names:
- 2x “web”
- 4x “authentication” (out of which 2x “pre-authenticated”)
- 2x “websphere
For all of you who weren’t aware that the class browsing frame in the regular Javadoc frameset has a horizontal scrollbar, I invite you to navigate through the incredible verbosity of Spring Security:
http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/docs/3.1.x/apidocs/index.html
</rant>
October 8th, 2012 at 23:01
I’d be willing to bet that a Markov-chain generated class name (based on Spring Security) would be indistinguishable from the real thing.
October 8th, 2012 at 23:35
Haha, very nice. You can calculate the probability of such a generator to produce an AuthenticatorAuthenticatedAuthenticationAuthenticatingAuthenticatorCator
October 9th, 2012 at 16:37
Ah Spring security. Last time I tried to use it I was trying to figure out how to do something relatively simple (I thought) but which was not exactly like anything the manual showed. I kept finding explanations on the web and example code, and would find that they did not work, because they were for different versions of it. That’s the nice thing about Spring, I guess. Don’t like their recommended way of doing something? No problem, wait a release or two, and it will surely be different…
I think next time I may try Shiro: http://shiro.apache.org/
October 16th, 2012 at 17:27
Yes, hmm. I should do that with jOOQ too
I mean the frequent changing of API elements that I don’t like.
Then again, I did that in early versions of jOOQ and got “corrected”:
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/jooq-user/3wyTXLwX9Sw/discussion
Now I’m glad, I think a lot more about new API elements before introducing them. Which keeps me from adding J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource2 and other stuff
October 16th, 2012 at 22:51
Reblogged this on Development Blog.
October 18th, 2012 at 15:54
It get’s the job done? Yes.
October 18th, 2012 at 15:59
Well, things do get the job done, occasionally. That’s true… Kinda like this hammer:
February 26th, 2013 at 13:03
[...] still be simple to use an API which isn’t concise. I’d consider using Spring’s J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource simple. You configure it, you inject it, done. But the name hardly indicates [...]
March 30th, 2013 at 12:31
[...] J2eeBasedPreAuthenticatedWebAuthenticationDetailsSource. Note, I’ve blogged about conciseness before… [...]