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Thank God Java EE Is Not Like Ajax
Slightlyright writes, "Java Developer's Journal reports that some people in the community are wishing that "Java EE would be more Ajax-like because 'EJB 3.0 can not save Java EE.' This has caused strong reactions from bloggers such as Rich Internet Application pioneer Coach Wei, who wrote: 'Which aspect of Ajax [do] we really want Java EE to be like? The difficulty in developing Ajax code? The difficulty in maintaining Ajax code? The extreme fragile nature of Ajax code? The extremely fragmented nature of Ajax support from different browsers?'"
the JCP is too slow and crufty, comes up with homegrown technologies nobody wants to use, etc. and that tools such as Hibernate and Spring not borne from the community process are superior or, in the case of EJB 3.0, adopted.
I guess I don't know why "Ajax" was brought up, I haven't used it and it's not something I'm familiar with. Maybe Ajax doesn't belong in the same class of technologies. Arguing about the specifics means missing the point, though.
It often takes "rebel" technologies to move things forward. It also takes some experimentation to develop a technology; i.e. coming up with a rigorous, solid standard might prevent its spread. Sometimes sloppiness is good. RSS, HTML, etc. have done okay despite the sloppiness. Requiring every web page be HTML compliant would have stifled the web.
Recently, I've started working on Weblogic. I used to develop with JBoss. In terms of service deployment, JBoss is superior to Weblogic. I guess with Weblogic, you're still stuck writing a lot of code to deploy JMX services. I noticed at my new company that programmers ended up launching network servers from a Servlet, which was not its intended use. The ease of deploying MBeans and dependency control with JBoss is superior. It can be done easily with a bit of XML, and no code is required. JBoss also handles ordered deployments better. With Weblogic, deployment ordering is done by assigning a deployment order number (1-4000 or something) to your deployment. It reminds me of writing programs with line numbers back in the good old days of BASIC.
It's my guess that functionality from Spring will be eventually refined into a series of JCPs. Sometimes it's better that standards develop in this way.
I think you just hit the nail right on the head. CEOs and marketing types want the latest, "greatest", buzzword-compliant software. Old standbys are no longer will probably work just as well, maybe better, but they aren't cool. Actually, geeks aren't immune to this problem either. Being on the cutting edge is fun, and sometimes we forget that old, tried and proved techologies lasted so far for a reason. Being on the cutting edge is fun, and sometimes we forget that old, tried and proved techologies lasted so far for a reason.
<sarcasm>
So what you are saying is that after C, C++ and a number of other golden-oldie technologies have gone through the process, Java has now also become mature enough to be declared to be 'dying' by the buzzword junkies?
</sarcasm>
But on a more serious note this dude coachwei has a point, best practices is a concept that is pretty much non existent in a lot of places and that is not just true of AJAX. There are times I wish that more Java webapp developers knew why it is important to write thread safe code and what polymorphism and inheritance are useful for.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
They also had a
I also Googled Scott Dietzen (Zimbra)
"Scott Dietzen is widely credited with helping put together the J2EE standard, launching the web application server category, and launching the Java Community Process"
"Scott Dietzen is the former CTO of the eCommerce Server Division of BEA Systems. Dietzen came to BEA via the acquisition of WebLogic"
"President and Chief Technology Officer of Zimbra"
And in the other corner, we have IBM. Nobody ever lost their job recommending IBM. Rod Smith (IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies) isn't small potatoes either.
So, while I don't disagree with the meat of your post, it seems to me that when those guys say "qualified to learn Ajax" that is what they mean.
I imagine that they interview lots of engineers. I hope that 1 in 40 isn't for engineers trying to get into a job involving AJAX, because that would be a dismal number. It'd make more sense if they were talking about 1 in 40 of all engineers interviewed for various positions... but that's just a wild ass guess with no factual support.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
http://www.xml11.org/
Although it doesn't get the hype that GWT does, XML11 is a much better implementation of the idea. It works with java byte code instead of source like GWT so it's more stable. GTW doesn't yet work with java 5 because of the new language syntax. XML11 works fine since the java byte code is the same between java 4 and java 5.
Also, it's based on the AWT framework (same classes with different implementations) so developers already familiar with AWT can get productive faster - instead of having to learn yet another gui framework.
As long as you don't hit swap. Once you do, garbage collection lasts for minutes due to having to traverse nearly all of applications memory. I don't think that problem can be solved in an userspace app.
Except that the API documentation lies. Graphics2D methods that are specified as never blocking block. Methods that are supposed to return on true on success always return false, despite being succesfull. And methods throw random, undocumented exceptions. Then there's this weird bug where image scaling takes 10 times as much time if the source image is not in sRGB color space. All this in Sun's own Java implementation. I hate to think what bugs will surface if the program is ran in other implementations.
So no, you don't get rid of workarounds in Java, at least in the GUI.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.