Okay, I admit it, I like writing the mass of utilities, reinvented wheels, and heady edifices to the god of improving my own productivity. I'll sharpen the saw until it can cut sound. I am a library and framework writing junky!
Along comes RoR, now I find myself having to bear down and implement the actually business functionality for the application. Now it is "implement a SOAP/HTTP service to allow the Swing client to post back its offline changes" and "build an arbitrarily queryable entity-change audit report." This is no fun compared to writing a config file parser or persistence abstraction layer that can transparently swap out any number of relational databases, orm frameworks, ldap backends, or transaction log based in-memory systems!
These folks have their priorities all wrong. Programmers are supposed to write libraries for other programmers to use in order to write frameworks for other programmers to use in order to implement Excel and Visio like interfaces so that the business analysts can write useful(?) software.
writebacks...
Aha! Now I see where Sun and MS were right on their web frameworks and APIs :-P
Re the :-p's
This was firmly tongue in cheek, but came after a morning of working on an app and trying to find something arcane and technical to do on it, and not finding anything =) Yeah, same applies in many spaces, but this was a rails app. Really I should talk about "deciding how to lay things out, creating a build.xml (or spending a day pounding maven into what I want), glueing frameworks together, writing factory beans, trying to remember which DSL is used where, etc..."
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