This morning, and the latter half of last week, I have been “officially” working on a WebLogic deployment, probably most of next week too. This is so déja vu it’s almost surreal – as if the 00s never happened, server-side tech-wise. You could pretty much skip from 2000 to 2010 and be completely familiar with all this. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing; on the one hand, that’s a sign of “real engineering”, I’m sure if you took a 10-year break from civil or mechanical engineering the industry you returned to would of course be more advanced, but everything would be more-or-less what you were used to. I suppose there would have been a schism when CAD became mainstream, but certainly not over the last 10 years.

But on the other hand, the material we work with isn’t concrete or steel, it’s infinitely malleable. Have we really come no further than the honking great RDBMS ↔ J2EE ↔ HTML applications we all worked on back then? That were obviously not even a great way to do things back then? Massive resources (I mean, machinery, but a cast of thousands of people too) to do the simplest things, 1000× the computational power of the old mainframe/terminal setups to do the same business processes, but in glorious technicolour. Don’t even talk to me about SOA, that’s just CORBA and EAI with a little sprinkle of fairy dust…

How to get to the next level?