My friend David Hussman once said to me, "The next person that says the word 'POJO' to me is going to get stabbed in the eye with a pen."  At the time, I just commiserated about people who follow crowds rather than making their own decisions.

David's not a violent person.  He's not prone to fits of violence or even hyperbole.  What made this otherwise level-headed coach and guru resort to non-approved uses of a Bic?

This weekend in No Fluff, Just Stuff, I had occasion to contemplate POJOs again.  There were many presentations about "me too" web frameworks.  These are the latest crop of Java web frameworks that are furiously copying Ruby on Rails features as fast as they can.  These invariably make a big deal out of using POJOs for data-mapped entities or for the beans accessed by whatever flavor of page template they use. (See JSF, Seam, WebFlow, Grails, and Tapestry 5 for examples.)

Mainly, I think the infuriating bit is the use of the word "POJO" as if it's a synonym for "good".  There's nothing inherently virtuous about plain old Java objects.  It's a retronym; a name made up for an old thing to distinguish it from the inferior new replacement.

People only care about POJOs because EJB2 was so unbelievably bad.

Nobody gives a crap about "POROs" (Plain old Ruby objects) because ActiveRecord doesn't suck.

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