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Java EE 5 Development Waiting on Vendors

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cart-before-horse dept.

twofish writes "Java EE 5 was a major update and most of the major application server vendors do not yet have compliant versions released. Dr. Dobb's reports that this is delaying most solution providers from developing products based on it, as their customers are not ready for them. However there is some significant movement among the big players. Among the major vendors, Sun has released support, WebLogic is close with JBoss following soon after. Oracle has not announced a road map and IBM is lagging significantly behind, with full support not due until 2008."

3 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Re:If Java 1.4 works for you.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, the main reason to switch to 1.6 is that earlier versions won't run under Vista. (Of course, that assumes you're running Vista in the first place...)

    As for Java 1.5, the main reason to switch to it is for generics which are very useful server-side. Of course, there's no technical reason that generics couldn't be backported to 1.4, but Sun refuses to allow code with generics to generate Java 1.4-compatible bytecode, so if you want generics, you're stuck with 1.5. (Despite the fact that generics are implemented via what's effectively a compiler preprocessor.)

    But other than supporting Vista, I know of no reason to upgrade to 1.6. As far as I can tell, it offers nothing that anyone would want. (The only major upgrade is the addition of various scripting libraries, in yet another Sun library-bloat move. There's no reason Java should require 500MB, but that's the size of my Java directory.)

  2. Re:It's just too damn complex. by MythMoth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The architecture of Java 5 EE is unnecessarily complex.

    This usually translates as "I don't understand all of the Java features - therefore it must be BAD.

    No. Java is necessarily complex. The features aren't their for Sun's entertainment - they're there because certain customers need and use them. It's not the most appropriate environment to build a "little" website, but that doesn't make it "unnecessarily" complex when building big ones.

    --
    --- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
  3. Re:It's just too damn complex. by kevin_conaway · · Score: 5, Insightful
    No, Java is often unnecessarily complex. Most languages get by with arrays; Java has arrays, Arrays, Vectors, and ArrayLists, all with subtly different APIs. Ditto Hashtable and HashMap. Mostly this explosion of APIs has happened because Sun hasn't thought through the design before adding stuff to the language.

    The differences you describe are there for concurrency. A Vector is a thread-safe List. A Hashtable is a thread-safe Map.

    Futhermore, you shouldn't be programming to concrete implementations like Vector, ArrayList or HashMap anyway. You should be programming to interfaces like List or Map so that implementation differences don't matter.