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> 
