[TYPO3-dev] The extbase dilemma

[Dmitry Dulepov]

Hi!

Please, see this e-mail as friendly and its mood as sad and thinking.

Jochen Rau wrote:
> At that point in time FLOW3 was based on an implementation of the
> JSR283. This part got backported to Extbase as the QueryObjectModel. The
> Query object on top of it is also mainly a back-port. The layer below is
> the Typo3DbBackend and the DataMapper. I only took the skeletton of
> these Classes and reimplemented most of the methods in order to work
> with v4. So, I take the blame for that.
>
> As people started to use Extbase, we implemented some features that are
> really necessary in order to write meaningful queries. Examples are the
> contains() or in() methods, and the dot-operator. Those features got
> forward-ported to FLOW3.
>
> In early 2010 Karsten encountered a problem with the dirty monitoring
> (http://forge.typo3.org/issues/6290). This resulted in some major
> changes to the persistence layer of FLOW3. I started to backport these
> changes, but realized that this will be a breaking change. So, Sebastian
> and I decided to wait for the widget concept and optimize the existing
> code base of the persistence layer. Then came Doctrine2.

You know what bothers me most? Why everybody in TYPO3 declines the 
experience of others? I worked with JSR283 since 2003 for a couple of years 
before 2006 when v5 started to worship that spec. I knew the whole spec was 
trouble. The company where I worked, created banking software at that time 
for customers, whose names you hear often in news (and I still can't name 
them due to NDA).

I talked to Kasper, Robert and Sebastian and told them that it is a no go, 
especially sample Java implementation they wanted to use. We used it and 
were hit hard in the head with tons of problems. I told all about that at 
t3dd06 to everybody in v5 team. And what? "Who cares? ©". Nobody even 
wanted to listen. I still remember those smilies on faces and looks like 
"we know better" and "we will make it". No, it didn't happen: neither 
better, no make it. Nobody wanted to listen and reuse experience of others. 
v5 team proudly wanted to hit all walls themselves. So they did it for many 
years to finally switch to Doctrine. That's the first really wise decision 
that I see (though I must admit I do not follow their development).

Do you think I took all that easily? No, I didn't. It was a pain. I love 
TYPO3, I invested so much time in it that it became my other child. It was 
really hard to see how TYPO3 goes the way it never even should have tried 
to go...

Extbase next... I appreciate the hard work you did on Extbase. No jokes, no 
sarcasm. I really do. And I respect that a lot, because Extbase is great 
piece of code, it looks wonderful to me. I wish everybody could write that 
clean and nice. But that code was based on concepts that were originally 
wrong. It is great that you coded it but you admitted yourself (on 
t3dd09???) that your knowledge of TYPO3 at that moment was not enough. Why 
didn't you ask for help? Same proudness as in F3 team? It is like Fluid 
created during one night in Berlin after lots of beer. Really useful 
software is not created like that. It is created after a lot of thinking 
and consideration of many factors, after prioritizing and sacrificing of 
many things.

This is neither your fault, nor F3 team's. The whole TYPO3 is one big 
experiment, it goes like this for years and we were able to create a great 
product and great community. But we call out CMS "enterprise". I think we 
should finally move from experiments to enterprise development. This might 
not be fun anymore but we should finally grow up from being chidren to 
being serious *product*.

-- 
Dmitry "itoldyou" Dulepov
TYPO3 core&security team member
E-mail: dmitry.dulepov at typo3.org
Web: http://dmitry-dulepov.com/