Mark Gregory Turansky

The Great Indian Outsourcing movement will be over within two years.

That’s what an architect turned blogger who writes anonymously from Bangalore is predicting. The author is writing from the movement’s Ground Zero, so he may have better insight than the rest of us. But I’ve got good anecdotal evidence from a local outsourcing company that lends weight to his prediction.

I live and work in Charleston, S.C., an area known more for its beautiful beaches and gorgeous live oak trees than high technology (though we do have Robert X. Cringley). But Charleston’s location can attract businesses that don’t necessarily need high technology, just smart people. Outsourcing is one of those types of businesses.

I know personally a project manager at a local outsourcing company. Our daughters go to school together. We were talking at a recent birthday party about outsourcing, cost, and the availability of talent. Business is booming, but it has little to do with cost, she tells me. She says its the lack of local talent that drives most of their business. They deal largely with the marketing end of technology, making websites and fancy Flash applications. Madison Avenue marketing firms would rather hire local Flash experts, she says, but they’ve hired them all. They’d prefer the rapid turnaround that local talent can give them. There just aren’t enough talented people in NYC to fill the huge demand, so they outsource to Charleston, S.C. In turn, this local company sends the work to a development center they own in Costa Rica. Costa Rica is, I’m surprised to learn, a hot up-and-coming technology spot. And you don’t have to wait 12 hours for Costa Rican project managers and developers to reply to email or voice mail.

The Tired Architect - our Bangalorian blogger - talks about the availability of talent in Eastern Europe and China, and there’s obviously talent in Central America. Brazil is another up-and-coming technology hot spot.

I agree with The Tired Architect that India’s monopoly on the outsourcing market is over.

Reinventing a square wheel is a common anti-pattern. The idea is a) we don’t need to reinvent the wheel because b) we’re likely to recreate it poorly compared to what is already available. But if we never reinvent any wheels, then we never progress beyond what we have. The real question, then, is when does it make sense to recreate a wheel? Some wheels need to be recreated.

I recently reinvented a wheel. A big one. The wheel is “Enterprise Messaging,” which much be complex because it has “enterprise” right in the name! I’d be a fool to reinvent that wheel, right? Maybe. Maybe not. We fit our “enterprise messaging system” into 92kb:

Some won’t consider 92kb to be “enterprisey” enough, but that’s ok with me. I know we were able to put 1.3 million real-world messages through our bus over a weekend. That’s enterprisey.

Jonas Bonér wrote an article about building a POJO datagrid using Terracotta Server, and I replied on his blog saying we did something similar by using Terracotta Server as a message bus. Another reader asked why I did this instead of using JMS.

I think there are several benefits to this reinvented wheel:

TINY!

92kb contains the entire server framework. We have another jar containing common interfaces we share with client applications that weighs in at 18kb.

It works!

A single “consumer” in our framework is bootstrapped into an isolated classloader, which enables our framework to load applications (the various apps we need to integrate) into their own isolated classloaders. One consumer can process a message for any integrated application.

This is utility computing without expensive VMWare license fees.

We’re consolidating servers instead of giving each application dedicated hardware. The servers were mostly idle, anyway, which is why enterprises are looking to utility computing and virtualization to make more efficient use those spare CPU cycles. In our framework, hardware becomes generic processing power without the need for virtualizing servers. Scaling out the server farm benefits all applications equally, whereas the prior deployments required separate capital expenditures for each new server.

Pure POJO

Our framework runs inside an IDE without any server infrastructure at all. No ActiveMQ, no MySQL, and no Terracotta Server. Developers can stand up their own message bus in their IDE, post messages to it, and debug their message code right in the framework itself.

We introduce Terracotta Server as a configuration detail in a test environment. Configuration Management handles this part, leaving developers to focus on the business logic.

So, I might not be writing my own servlet container anytime soon (not when Tomcat and Jetty are open source and high quality), but I think it made a lot of sense to reinvent the “enterprise messaging” wheel. Terracotta Server allows me, in effect, to treat my network as one big JVM. My simple POJO model went wide as a configuration detail. That makes my bus (and TC) remarkably transparent.

I think the claims made by the people hawking this book are some of the most disingenuous things I’ve ever read:

http://sourcemaking.com/design-patterns-simply

They are selling a rehash of the classic Gang of Four (GoF) Design Patterns book as a PDF, making preposterous claims which I’ll cut & paste here. You can’t make this stuff up.

The Whys:

Why should I read it?
When you finish reading this book, you can go to your boss and ask him for a promotion.

Why? Because using design patterns will allow you to get your tasks done twice faster, write bugless code and create an efficient and reliable software architecture.

How to become programming guru?
The main difference between a programming guru and a novice is the knowledge of secret coding tricks, as well as awareness of most cornerstones and the ability to avoid them.

Design patterns were created as a Bible of avoiding problems related to software design. Isn’t it a true guru’s handbook?

“Bugless code” after learning design patterns! I must be a poor learner, because I still have bugs in my code and I’ve lived with the GoF book for many years now. Unless you are writing code for the space shuttle, you’ve probably written your share of bugs, too. And bosses don’t give promotions because you read a book about patterns. Mine gave me promotions because of hard work, passion, and creativity in problem solving.

“Testimonials”
If you follow through to the order page, you see the publisher is based in the Ukraine. That explains the broken English “testimonials”:

Daniel Sommers, UK

I have learned all design patterns about a 3 days with this book. Thank you very much!!!!

and

Jeremy Parkinson, USA
Four month ago I was just coder in Boeing corp. I had a lot things to learn to get a level up in my skills, and I started with this book. Now I am a software architect and I happy, because nobody in my department is so good with programming as me!

I’d be pissed off if I were Boeing. That “testimonial” makes me think the talent there must be terrible. Boeing does “aerospace engineering.” Rocket scientists. Literally. I suspect they are a smarter bunch than “Jeremy Parkinson.”

Free Book Offer:

Buy our book now and get a free gift! (limited offer)
It is classic “Design Patterns” book by “Gang of Four”.

Amazon is selling the classic GoF book for $38, but this publisher is going to sell you a PDF for $20 and give you a $38 book for free. If they gave a single GoF book away for free, would that be considered a “limited offer”?

The odd thing is that the quality of the rest of the site appears, at first blush, quite good. The writing on the pages describing each of the patterns is good and without any outlandish claims. It makes me wonder if they didn’t get that copy from somewhere else. Regardless, the content on the site is sufficiently good that one wouldn’t need to buy their PDF.

Save your money. Or better yet, buy the real GoF book. It’s a classic for a reason, and there are products that nicely complement the book, like a wall poster detailing the original patterns in a striking visual way.