How much time out of your day does IBM waste?

Blogger Chris Hardin has written up a post about the breakdown of time wasted while using WAS and RAD, a brutal loss of at least two hours while predicting much more (with a lot of "oftens" and stuff.) It makes you wonder: what would the breakdown be with other products?


"

• 1 hour sporadic time waiting for WAS to deploy after I make a change. On a heavy day, this can be two hours.
• 30 min - 1 hour waiting for RAD to respond during a garbage collection cycle. You'll know this is happening because RAD will lock up until it finishes.
• Some days in a month, I am trying to figure out some classpath issue that is specific to WAS. Many standard J2EE application setups, choke in WAS due to WAS trying to favor it's own IBM classpath. This can range for a couple hours to a couple days.
• 30 minutes a day looking for some setting in RAD that is hidden in 5 different places
• Often I spent a couple hours looking for some issue that turns out to be an IBM specific problem. A good example is that WAS wasn't allowing my servlet filters to fire in an app so I had to set a property in WAS console to fix it and another time I had to patch WAS because the idgits at IBM decided to make it, by default, look for Web Service annotations and try to create a Web Service and they didn't put in a way to turn it off. Hours and hours of work here.
• I spend a lot of time looking for settings in WAS Admin console that are easy to find in JBoss or Tomcat."

Yes its slow, but then imagine the runtime plugin's and stuff that get loaded with or without the knowledge of the developer.

One of the comments which sounded interesting

"In my case, I have not had any of the problems the original poster complained about.

We have the WebSphere environment managed with WebSphere ND. We are able to install and propogate on the server farm a new EAR file in less than five minutes. I worked with the operations team to create Jython scripts allowing installs and updates to be as simple as executing a single command on the command line.

I am able to launch RSA 7.5 on my laptop (a dual core centrino) in about two minutes. This includes opening about 20 projects in the primary workspace.

Of course, tools as complex as WebSphere and Rational products are very easy to misuse and thus suffer great performance problems. However, at my company, my team encourages spending time to learn the tools -- taking the necessary courses and following the advice in the Redbooks. As a result, we know how to tune the product, modify the eclipse.ini file, change the capabilities and which components are started by default, etc. It takes time to learn to use complex tools. But, once we learned the tool, we are not spending time cursing it.

Reminds me of the complaints against JPA. When developers misuse JPA, the resulting programs are awful and very slow. Then the developer curses JPA. But, the problem is not JPA, the problem was the developer used the wrong mental model when creating the Entities.

"

So bottomline are we making a U turn and going back to the good old days of VI and textpad's? Sure i can launch a textpad in 2 seconds and stuff in my code and have maven do the build and have it hot deployed onto the server of my choice.

What is your take ?