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This blog is meant to be an educational one, but I found something I had to complain about. Check out this block of text from the Acegi Security System for Spring reference manual. (Section 2.4)

“For those not familiar with AOP, the key point to understand is that Acegi Security can help you protect method invocations as well as web requests. Most people are interested in securing method invocations on their services layer. This is because the services layer is where most business logic resides in current-generation J2EE applications (for clarification, the author disapproves of this design and instead advocates properly encapsulated domain objects together with the DTO, assembly, facade and transparent persistence patterns, but as anemic domain objects is the present mainstream approach, we’ll talk about it here).”

Huh? What am I reading here? Since when is a reference manual considered to be a means to tout your own personal agenda?

As a potential user of this security framework for Spring, which by-the-way, does not advocate the author’s point-of-view, I want to read about the Acegi tool and learn how to use it. All I expect from a reference manual is to learn what “it” does and how to use “it”. Hopefully most people share my expectations. Someone please let me know if I am way off the mark here.

In a world where open-source solutions are trying to gain momentum and be used as professional business solutions, the writings of the author do not help the cause. Does this happen in professional industries?

I can just imagine…

“Gamsung Model XXXXX-01115 Reference Guide

Section 1. Turning on the TV
- In accordance with the design of all Gamsung televisions, the Power button is located on the bottom panel in the center of the Television set. (For the record, the author of this manual disapproves of this design and prefers the approach of placing the Power button in the upper right-hand corner)”

What would happen to this author? First, the editor would either laugh and cut out this ridiculous text or he/she would notify his/her superior and the author would be fired on the spot.

The problem of course is that in the open-source world we often don’t have someone to fill the “editor” type of role. Documentation is an afterthought. Unfortunately for the Acegi project, the unprofessional writings of Ben Alex are the result.

I’m a big advocate of open-source and would very much like to see if flourish. But it looks like we still have a ways to go.