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?'"

Comments

You mean the buzz?

[quick2think]

I Think Java developers are more in need of the buzz java once had. A CEO looks at AJAX as better, because of it's recent exposure, and buzz word power. Java was no different in it's infancy, with it's broad promises. Java justy wants to be cool agaim ...

Re:You mean the buzz?

[bcat24]

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.

Re:You mean the buzz?

[Savage-Rabbit]

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.

Re:You mean the buzz?

[joto]

It has been a long time since "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" by Edsger W. Dijkstra was released, marking the begining of the end for procedural based spaghetti code(or at least the acceptance of the inevitability of it's existence). Programs got too large and complex, and a new paradigm was needed.

Edsger Dijkstra was a troll. His "goto" paper is one of the most obvious examples of this. Now, just because you are a troll, doesn't mean you aren't right at times. Dijkstra was right almost all of the time. He rightly criticized a lot of "best practices" of his day. And coming from academia, he had the advantage of not having to offer anything better. Which he, by the way, didn't. Dijkstra preferred to write provably correct code in non-existing languages. Which is fine in academia...

Now, with the web, computer solutions are no longer a single entity, and can span across systems and even languages.I think there needs to be a similiar paper to stress standards and best practices, and to caution the use of bleeding edge technologies.

There are plenty. A quick web-search will likely reveal that there are more of them than you can expect to read in a full year. Programming is no longer such a niche area that a single professor can write a troll that will be quoted by almost everyone 30 years later.

But if Dijkstra lived today, he wouldn't even touch web-programming with a ten-foot pole. He would have been more likely to start by proving some formal properties of a new system designed for the same purpose as web-programming, but never implemented it himself. He would then write papers advocating people start using this system instead of the web. And he would be right, his system would be better... if it only ever got made!

It's not that people don't know web-programming as it exists today is too difficult. It's just that we fail to have better alternatives.

Perhaps something with a title like "Why you should learn less and do more". Although many people complain about Java's complexity(The architecture, not the language), it is a very good model of standards. It is this model of standards, not the language itself, that make it so revolutionary in this era of web computing. It is a sad day when marketing wins, again.

If you had read Dijkstras paper instead of just quoting the title, you would see that this is not in his spirit at all. See also my above comments.

Which aspect of Ajax?

[TubeSteak]

"Which aspect of Ajax [do] we really want Java EE to be like?"

How about the Web 2.0 part

(It's a joke. Laugh)
(Well, sortof a joke)

Re:Which aspect of Ajax?

[TubeSteak]

And I found this part of TFA interesting:

"What else? The difficulty of finding and hiring Ajax developers? According to Rod Smith (IBM) and Scott Dietzen (Zimbra), both independently mentioned that one out of 40 engineers interviewed would be qualified to learn Ajax."

Not qualified to code,
qualified to learn

Re:Which aspect of Ajax?

[Plutonite]

I hope you're right.

Because if 1 out of 40 S/W Eng. are capable of understanding a javascript function call, then by God I deserve more money.

Re:Which aspect of Ajax?

[Irish_Samurai]

Did they really mean qualified to learn? Or did they mean qualified to apply properly?

AJAX, and multiple other web technologies, suffer from being judged with criteria determined by the critic. In tech this translates into multile disciplines. UI guys love AJAX if used properly - the same build could be looked at from an app programmer's perspective as junk.

AJAX seems to address the cultural side of things. People love flashy things, especially if they can deliver 80% -90% of the functionality they want. An application developer may be able to deliver 100% of wanted functionality, but in a way that a user finds aesthetically displeasing.

I think this brings up an interesting point. When do developers start to realize that users will not conform to what they should do, but what they want to do? Learning the aspects of a development technology inside and out will not give a developer this edge. Paying attention to social aspects will.

I think that's what these guys meant when they said qualified to learn.

Re:Which aspect of Ajax?

[julesh]

There's somewhat more to writing a large-scale AJAX application than "understanding a javascript function call". You have to contend with multiple implementations that work different ways. You have to work around the fact that javascript has little or no support for techniques that are typically used in writing large applications. Modularising a javascript application is hell. The method of defining a class is bizarre. Inheritance is horrible, particularly if the class you're inheriting from is in a different file, because there are no guarantees about the order in which they will be loaded. Multiple inheritance...? The language can do it, sure, but it isn't trivial.

Re:Which aspect of Ajax?

[Osty]

There's somewhat more to writing a large-scale AJAX application than "understanding a javascript function call". You have to contend with multiple implementations that work different ways. You have to work around the fact that javascript has little or no support for techniques that are typically used in writing large applications. Modularising a javascript application is hell. The method of defining a class is bizarre. Inheritance is horrible, particularly if the class you're inheriting from is in a different file, because there are no guarantees about the order in which they will be loaded. Multiple inheritance...? The language can do it, sure, but it isn't trivial.

And you've just proven that you don't understand JavaScript. JavaScript != Java (or C++, or C#). It's not designed around functions and classes. Javascript is a functional language, and as such is designed around closures. Closures allow you to define classes and functions, but they also allow you to do quite a bit more (and also let you shoot yourself in the foot if you like).

You're correct in saying that there's more to writing a large-scale AJAX application than just understanding a JavaScript function, but most of the things you mention are irrelevant (well, they're important to understanding JavaScript, but that's a core competency for any type of web design, not just AJAX). Using AJAX is easy, especially with all of the frameworks available that abstract browser compatibility issues for you. Using AJAX well is difficult (dealing with accessibility, server load, concurrency, etc).

Isn't Ajax Javascript?

[mark-t]

What does Javascript have to do with Java?

wow, what an excellent point!

[Anonymous Coward]

When the guy in the first article said we must stop thinking about "faster bubble sorts"... well, that really hit home for me. Why, me and my buddies spend hours a day trying to improve bubble sorts. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking about bubble sorts. It's hard, man, once we came up with this recursive divide-and-conquer approach--looked not so slow, even quick, but then we realized it wasn't really a bubble sort so we couldn't use it in our programs. Back to the drawing board.

Anyway, just wanted to say that I immediately realized that SOA guy was a real engineer--skilled, one of "us", not a marketroid at all--when I read that quote.

AJAX between JS and Java servlets

[tepples]

What does Javascript have to do with Java?

ECMAScript code on the client manipulates the HTML DOM and requests data in XML or JSON format from a server through XMLHttpRequest. A servlet produces such data.

Re:AJAX between JS and Java servlets

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm not sure what's more terrifying, the number of buzzwords in the one-sentence parent post, or the fact that I understood them all.

:-p

What does AJAX have to do with Java?

[saden1]

Java doesn't need saving and it isn't about EJB. Java is whatever you want it to be. Some folks have this notion that it should do and be what they want it to do/be which will hurt the platform in the long run because not everyone has the same need/requirements.

p.s. There is a reason why Java has withstood the test of time (for 11 years anyways) and that's because it is good platform and a robust one at that.

Not useful, not particularly entertaining...

[meburke]

The whole discussion is a waste of time, and the article itself is lame.

First of all, there is no careful description of the problem. A problem is the difference between the way things are and the way you want them to be. This takes into account the way things are that already acceptable. AJAX has some deficiencies, and it has some attractions. My questions are: Is it worth the effort to correct those deficiencies in AJAX? Is it worth the effort to include the attrations in EJ?

Secondly, there is no concensus on the appropriate domain for the different tools. Is EJ really a tool for doing the same things that AJAX does?

The point being made is ...

[Elias Ross]

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.

That's really kind of funny actually because...

[Assmasher]

...many ex-Java EJB devs think that all the current iterations of EJB are difficult to develop in (relatively), difficult to maintain, and fragile and difficult to support on multiple EJB servers... These are the main reason we're ex-Java EJB devs.

GWT

[HappyEngineer]

I just searched through these comments and didn't see any mention of GWT.

GWT is wonderful. I've programmed ajax stuff (check out my chess and checkers games. It's definitely brittle if you actually have to write the javascript and parse the xml and convert the xml to java objects manually.

But, using GWT has been a big eye opener for me. You write java code and it's compiled into javascript. It completely turns everything on its head. If you want to communicate some more information to the server from the client, all you need to do is add another method to the remote object (and its interfaces) and you suddenly have another statically type checked rpc call between client and server.

I'll probably still do simple form apps in struts, but I don't intend to ever write another line of javascript that's of any significant complexity. It's no longer necessary. No longer do I need to figure out incompatibilities between browsers. GWT just figures it out.

All these years people have been trying to make a good java webapp framework and GWT comes along and does things in a way that just turns everything on its head. Struts and Tapestry and JSF are all solving the wrong problems. They all try to make it easy to take html forms and retrieve and validate that information.

GWT turns it around and just lets you communicate java objects. I used to be unhappy that I needed to settle for choosing which framework was the least bad. Now I just say to hell with the lot of them except in situations where javascript isn't allowed.

Java EE is *different* from AJAX, and vice-versa

[mritunjai]

I am disheartened by reading the comments... people, PLEASE for once in life go and read Java EE specs and see what it is intended to do.

Java EE is a framework to write business applications, for any kind of business, from issue trackers to ERP, the "business" in it doesn't mean "$$$ business" literally.

When writing business applications, it tries to enforce you to separate your concerns, especially, the presentation layer (Servlets & JSP), the business logic (EJB) and enterprize information systems (EIS) (JDBC, EJB container managed persistence etc). Its a complete stack for developing applications.

AJAX deals with presentation layer, and more specifically, the interaction part of it. its a piece in the whole stack. The Java EE presentation layer does NOT depend on even having an HTML frontend even! (no sane framework does!).

So now, if you have an HTML/XML browser frontend and a human user using it, you may use AJAX for enhanced user experiece. There is nothing in Java EE that says you cannot take your favorite AJAX toolkit and use that to build your frontend.

So both technologies are not even competing on even a single issue. Both are complementary. You can use Java EE stack to develop your application, and when time comes to develop the frontend, you choose from plain old HTML, XHTML, XML, AJAX etc (or a combination thereof), to develop your application's "frontend".

Please stop this ignorant war. To make another bad /. analogy, its like car lovers and music system fans fighting with each other that the other is not like their's!

RTFA!!!

[SanityInAnarchy]

For the love of all that is holy, RTFA! The claim was not that Java EE should use Ajax, or that Java developers should use Ajax at all. Google Web Toolkit is completely irrelevant!

What was meant by this is that Ajax is a loose collection of cooperating technologies, without a standard, that develops very rapidly, and allows a lot of choices to the developer -- as opposed to Java EE as a rigid platform. Kind of like Linux vs BSD.

Even TFA understood this in the response.

The Slashdot response, so far, is roughly equivalent to if I said I wish Java had something like CPAN, and people jumped all over me with comments like "You want Java to use :: as the class separator? You want all variables to have dollar signs on them? You want no type checking, and all kinds of random C code?" Completely missing the point, of course. CPAN is a centralized collection of community modules, most of which play nice with each other, which make it possible to develop most Perl programs by splicing together 4-5 modules with <100 lines of glue code containing your actual program logic.

It's like a Wikipedia of code -- NO! Not in that anyone can edit any module. It's like Wikipedia in that it's a central repository of the collective programming skill of mankind. It's sort of the library to end all libraries.

Anyway. -1 Offtopic to the entire comment section this time. RTFA!

Dijkstra was NOT a troll

[Kenneth Stephen]

I'm afraid you're using the wrong word. A troll is someone who doesnt even believe in the arguments that they are espousing. Their whole purpose is to dump fuel on smoldering embers. This is something that cannot be said of Dijkstra. A polemicist is a more accurate description of who Dijkstra was.

A little clarification

[Aceticon]

J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) is a mix of two very different frameworks:

• EJBs (Enterprise Java Beans) and related technologies (such as JMS for asynchronous messaging) are backend technologies, aimed at things such as centralized business rules implementation, enterprise application integration, distributed functionality, multi-application interconnection, redundancy, integration with legacy servers and, more in general, big multiple-server/multiple-clients architectures. This stuff has nothing to do with AJAX and never will. It's used for reliable and flexible server-side provision of business functions (for example "Debit single account, credit multiple accounts") and is aimed at being easilly extended to provide extra business functions and cover extra resources (as in, more databases)
• JSPs (Java Server Pages - basically web page templates, equivalent to PHP pages) and Servlets (basically the Java equivalent of CGI-scripts) are the web-based user interface support components of J2EE. This stuff is most often used in conjuntion with EJBs, for example, providing a user-interface for the user accessible business functions - this usually happens in an intranet

JSPs and Servlets, with or without EJBs, can be (and are) used for web-based user interfaces on the Internet, although on their own they suffer scalability problems for concurrent access by many users and for speed of prototyping and developement of new features.

They are, however, pretty orthogonal to AJAX since they are server-side technologies. Both an Javascript controlled asynchronous HTTP request comming from a browser and a user triggered browser HTTP request look exactly the same to both JSPs and Servlets - they're just another HTTP request (HTTP/1.1 GET /bla)

Saying that J2EE should be more like AJAX is like saying that PHP should be more like AJAX or that CGI-scripts should be more like AJAX - complete nonsense!!!

Having better architectural support in J2EE for AJAX (for example, for being able to access a server-side business function in Javascript from the browser just as easilly as you can do it from the JSP layer) would be a good thing. However the groundwork need to support this on the server (J2EE) side is already done (it's called Web Services), and thus the biggest part of the work still needed to seamless provide the Javascript/AJAX code running on the browser with access to such remotely hosted business functions is ..... on the browser - which means either some enormous complex Javascript libraries or standardized extensions to at least the two maintream browsers.

Just as a reminder, AJAX is the kludge it is because there's so very little standardized functionality in the browser to allow dynamic, localized refreshing on a page of information which is externally hosted.

To wrap things up: server-side support is there already in J2EE that provides, via HTTP, seamless access to business functions hosted in a J2EE server. Whether the requester is a piece of AJAXified-Javascript running on a browser or a batch C application makes no different. As usual, most of the necessary stuff missing, is missing from the browser.

To the writter of the article: Server-side technologies are mature already, AJAX is far from it. Stop demanding that servers are adjusted to serve a single client implementation methodology. If you really want an architecturally sound solution, get up from your fat ass and start coding a Web Services client in Javascript.