Quartz Crystal

A very trying couple of days...  Faced with a job that cries out for a decent scheduler (polling feeds), I turned to OpenSymphony's Quartz.  I mean, the ads look so good: Robustness, recoverability, scalability, blah, blah.

First hint of warning I should have paid attention to was a couple of developers' names that I long associate with Doomed Pieces of Shit.  But it all still looked so good.  Until I got closer to the code.  Quartz?  Quartz Crystals for accuracy?  More like Crystal Meth!  Documented methods that mysterious fail to exist.  Examples that aren't.  I thought the JavaDoc got generated from the source, no?  I guess we have here the penetrating stench of Configuration Mismanagement.

Then you enter a twisty little maze of undocumented dependencies.  You will use Commons Logging.  You will use a bunch of J2EE stuff, even though you application is a simple standalone with no hint of J2EE awfulness in sight.

No.  After a day or so of hacking at this steaming turdpile my brain feels like so much oatmeal porridge that I can't even work even work up enough bile for a decently vitriolic blog post.  For me, one of the surest signs of a dying opensource project is when their wikis and forums are filled with spam because nobody can be bothered to disallow Guest users from posting; when the version-control system shows six checkins in the past six weeks.

I'm outa here in favour of Doug Lea's concurrency stuff. What a pleasure by contrast.  I'll live without clustering for now...