To stay relevant vendors and standards bodies create more specifications. To sell more products vendors implement those specification and add features (overhead and complexity). To ensure their job security and increase their salary software engineers learn, require and unduly introduce those APIs and complexities.

This triad of death (okay maybe that's a bit dramatic) is the vulnerable flank of the Java world. Where in this TLA soup are we supposed to actually solve real world business problems.

The next time you find yourself grabbing a singleton to create an abstract factory that generates the XML that you have to send to the Java method in a facade running in the same JVM all of wich is running inside of a 5-nines clustered application server that costs more than the car you ride to work and contains more acronyms than the Department of Defense all to write an internally facing inventory application, ask yourself "what the hell are we doing with technology, how are we making someones life easier, how are we helping companies save money."

While we're all doing things like peeling the onion of the WS-Death Star in the Java world it's no wonder the Ruby on Rails community is taking off. There's also no reason why we couldn't do the same thing in the Java. Ruby and Rails are both fine but they have their warts just like Java. Even Spring wich is the answer to J2EE alphabet soup is now a huge project with a ton of APIs.

So kiddies, quit chasing your tail with enterprisey apps, they're bad for your soul.