
When Formality Works - luu
http://codahale.com/when-formality-works/
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stickfigure
Not that I disagree with the essential point, but at least the Servlet
specification is an example of the process failing. The Servlet spec is a
wreck full of awful cruft. The REST tooling (JAX-RS) pretty much pretends that
the Servlet spec doesn't exist.

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mcguire
The servlet spec has been extended repeatedy as fashions in web development
change. JAX-RS is missing key features as it is and will probably gather its
own cruft over time.

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stickfigure
Sure. But the problem with the Servlet spec is that it was ill-conceived from
the start, attempting to span domains other than http processing. It's an
example of someone overthinking the problem instead of starting with an
elegant solution to an existing problem. In its many revisions, nobody has
thought to restart it from scratch the way that EJB/JPA did - what's happened
is that newer specs like JAX-RS work around Servlets (but don't fully remove
their necessity).

EJB/JPA (maligned as it is) is a good example of the process "working" \- one
product (Hibernate) dominated, and the people in charge of EJB realized their
overengineered, designed-by-committee spec was a turd.They started from
scratch with 3.0 and basically put the Hibernate guy (Gavin) in charge of it.
Thus JPA is basically Hibernate's API... the official standard more or less
reflected the de-facto standard.

