I’ve been the lead developer on a desktop project for over a year now, and now we’re about to take it to the web. No problems there, and I’ve frequently asked for advice about this here. One of the web guys (who can’t code worth anything; he has volumes of un-indented code, which in my book is inexcusable) has sort of taken the project over, which is OK by me as he’s done the work of talking to the client and he certainly knows more about Oracle databases than I do.

However, I am still going to be the primary (perhaps only) coder on this project, so once we get development started it’s going to pretty much be my game. The solution I’ve been intending to use (well known to the web guy) is jsps for the UI and PL/SQL for the server side code. Then today he comes in and tells me that he and my other boss (my “real” boss if you will) have decided between them that “we” aren’t going to use jsps and instead are going to do Oracle portlets, which I honestly know nothing about. The reason for this being that there is little jsp experience on our development team (there are about a half-dozen of us who work on various projects) and he and the other web guy have done tons of portlets (which the other guy has complained to me about in great detail).

Perhaps there is some good solid logic here; I wouldn’t know, not knowing anything about Oracle portlets. However, the thing that really bugs me is that I wasn’t consulted AT ALL. In fact he KNEW I’d rather be working in jsps (because I’d be working in Java, much closer to my favored Delphi) but decided to progress without me. My “real” boss knows nothing about anything web (he’s a tried and true Oracle database programmer who only does forms), so basically whatever the web guy said is what we’re going to do.

Now I’m furious because a) I’ve already developed jsp screens that we used in our design specification document for the client, and these could be easily fleshed out to work with real data, and b) I feel (since I’m the primary coder, I was in charge of the desktop version, and I know more than anyone else here about how this is all supposed to work) that I should have been in on any discussions regarding development path, even if my ideas weren’t used. As it stands now, I don’t know what the best solution is because nobody gave me the opportunity to find out. And as our “web” guys experience is completely with Oracle Portal, I’m not highly confident that he really has a firm grasp on the best solution anyway. In fact, he told me that jsps are probably superior, but that “for the team” the best solution is to use portlets (since I’m the only one who knows anything about jsps). I asked if there could be further discussion and he said “no, this is how it’s going to be”.

This is the most angry I’ve been in a while. I’m willing learn new stuff, and I’ll grudgingly even implement something I don’t think is a good solution, but having my opinion completely disregarded in favor of someone’s who write shoddy code is too much to over come. Am I overreacting? Is this a case of my arrogance and familiarity with a solution clouding my judgment, or do I have legitimate concerns?