It's Time to 'Re-Align' the JCP?

jgeelan writes "The original glorious premise behind a J2EE container was to abstract multithreading issues, server memory management, wire protocols, and so on, from Java programmers and allow them to focus on implementing solutions, not server infrastructure. Yet in the current issue of Java Developer's Journal, the director of technology at Personified Technologies, Jason Weiss, has lit a flame under J2EE, the jewel of the Java specification crown. The spec, writes Weiss, is too complex. As a community Java developers must pay attention to the beleaguered JCP process and realign it with creating solutions, like those routinely released by the Apache Software Foundation. Weiss argues that by taking steps now, Java developers would be investing in the future both of Java and the community that has grown up around Java. 'The entire JCP process must thematically reflect our desire to build solutions that simplify complex technologies for programmers,' Weiss continues. 'In fact, the JCP process should continue to use the JSR acronym, but with new meaning: "Java Solution Request," he adds. 'Somewhere during this journey the JCP has shifted from its solution-oriented roots to merely implementing specifications. This trend must be reversed ... for the sake of our community.'"

Comments

Oh please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Overly large, my ass. We're talking about server-side here, not client-side apps (where I'll admit, Java is far too large). Since when has providing a full feature-set been a problem for a server-side app? A development project with an intelligent architect will pick from the best of the J2EE apis (who needs to know about message beans if you're not going to use them?), and ignore the rest. Follow that standard, enforce it amongst the team of developers, and the 'overly large' API isn't going to be a problem.

J2EE is the C++ of our time

[melquiades]

J2EE, the jewel of the Java specification crown

Oh, come now. The jewel of the Java spec crown is the JLS itself -- Java's a gorgeous language (complaints from Lisp and Smalltalk purists aside), it's the language itself that won developers' hearts, and it's the language itself that underpins the good work of all the other specs.

J2EE is nobody's jewel. It's more like what C++ was about 15 years ago -- big, ugly, stinky, convoluted, overfeatured, overspecified, yet still incomplete, and works best if you just pretend that certain parts of it just don't exist ... but it does the job, it's practical, and the industry's behind it. Like C++, J2EE opened up a whole world of options that were reserved for elite programmers and academic researchers before it came along (J2EE opened up distributed computing much as C++ opened up OOP).

And, like C++, in about 10 years somebody will come along with something much better that looks like the vague picture of perfection we all almost have now, something cleaner and smarter, which picks the right problems and solves them well -- something that does to J2EE what Java did to C++.

The question is, will that something in 10 years also be a specification based on the Java language? That's what I think Jason Weiss's questions may really drive at. And I'm not willing to take guess at the answer.

Re:J2EE is the C++ of our time

[j3110]

Large and bloated or not, it's the best thing right now for what it does. It does remove security, clustering, distributed transactions, as well as the hardware abstraction that java removes, from the list of things the programmer needs. This is a complex problem that I can't really think of a better way to solve. If I named all the class libraries there where and said it was bloat and we didn't need them all, I'ld be laughed at, but this guy names several API's that are each useful in their own way. What's he want to do about it? Drop SOAP, RMI, EJB? You don't have to use any one of those to use any one of the other. The average server side programmer isn't going to avoid SOAP or RMI by not using J2EE. All the technologies he mentions don't go away when you don't use J2EE. He offers a lot of critisism with only the evidence that it is complex. If he thinks it's complex now, he should have had to write clustering, distributed transactions, and security for an application. At least then he would be qualified to call it complex. I don't want VB for the server side, it screwed up the client side enough. Sounds to me like the guy needs a book :)

Where I will attack J2EE is it's redundancy of input. How many times do you have to tell a computer that there is a public function of this bean that people in the role of admin can call? This is just a tool problem though. There are some nifty tools out there (XDoclet, objectfrontier) that help, but nothing that integrates all knowledge of a bean into one single point of access AND comes with a deploy tool to reconfigure the bean.