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Java EE 5 Development Waiting on Vendors
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."
Companies in the market for significant numbers of Java EE application servers and their attendant support contracts are rarely in a hurry to adopt the newest and latest technologies. Companies I work with usually lag at least a major revision - sometimes two - behind the bleeding edge.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
SAP released a Java EE 5 compatible application server a few weeks ago.
Why switch? If you need a feature from 1.5 or 1.6 then upgrade. Many server side applications of Java have absolutely no reason to upgrade. Most companies will be using 1.4 for many years.
There are significant upgrades on the rich client side for 1.5 and 1.6 especially in the Look and Feel area. My 1.6 apps in GTK look just like a native app, thus I use 1.6 for on the client side. I still however use 1.4 on the server side since there are no performance benefits for my applications. Nice thing about java is everything is byte code compatible downstream. I am sure there are providers out there who still use 1.3 on the server side.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
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
I built a EJB3 set of services along with working with another group who built JSF/Seam pages (interface) and using EJB3 stateful session beans and we deployed it all on JBoss using JDK1.5.0_06. In fact we used the J2EE 1.5 - granted we had to "spoof" Eclipse/MyEclipse into using the J2EE 1.5 jars and capabilities. But JBoss worked just fine with it all. This was a company internal application but it worked just fine. We used JBoss 4.0.4 GA Patch 1. I love the JDK/J2EE 1.5 stuff. Wish my current company would move from 1.4.2 to the 1.5.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Then there is Oracle...gads..when Microsoft finally gets SQLServer up to speed (and they will...they have a 20 year history of turning crap into gold)...Oracle is going to be standing out in the weeds wondering what the hell happened
What exactly does MS SQL Server and Oracle's RDBMS have to do with J2EE 5 and Oracle's Application server? You may or may not be right about SQL Server eventually supplanting Oracle as the big name RDBMS, but regardless, that's not what's being discussed here. The application server is completely separate from the DB server.
but having to trust IBM and Oracle to keep up is a major problem, without them showing REAL plans: I am left with Sun driving the bus ?
Hardly; JBoss and BEA (producers of WebLogic) have already released compliant servers. Given that I've only heard bad things about WebSphere (or indeed much of IBM's technology stack), I'm really not too concerned.
well we all know what can happen when you let geeks (and I am one) run free, then don't execute on what they make
What tends to happen in my experience is that they get it more or less good enough for their own use, then move on to the next thing that captures their imagination. That's all well and good, but someone needs to put in the remaining, tedious 80% of the effort to do all the boring tidying up, polishing, documentation, possibly accreditation, etc.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I used to be very much into J2EE (even wrote a book on it), and it is great to see the platform evolve as the Java language evolves.
:-)
That said, I have "moved down the food chain", starting to favor just running Tomcat+custom tag libs+JSPs+persitence. I used to mostly use Hibernate, then simplified to using Prevaler. In the last year or two, I have favored Rails for small quick web apps.
J2EE is great for large scale projects, but for most web apps and portals there are easier to use solutions. I have even gone back to using Common Lisp for web apps and web services in the last year (that is "moving back up the food chain"
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.
.invoke() a function.
I stopped J2EE at JDK 1.4 and EJB 2.0, so perhaps J2EE 5 has some useful features. However, I can say with some certainty that Sun's spec have been on the one hand grossly overdesigned and on the other hand ridiculously limited. Examples:
java.io.*
1. Why in the world should a FileInputStream/FileReader not automatically use a BufferedInputStream/BufferredReader underneath?
2. Why can't one just read a String from an InputStream by passing an encoding?
java.net.HttpUrlConnection
1. Why can't I get the actual HTTP error number and error page returned by a web site? (If you didn't already know, 404's are not returned as a generic error but rather thrown as a FileNotFoundException. But it also does it for 403, 405, and others so that you can't actually report the REAL error code. Also, in JDK 1.2.2, the function getErrorStream() returned null in all non-404 cases.)
java.lang.ref.*
1. The API to reference methods and variables is silly with all the Exceptions one must catch just to
EJB - Actually, just read Bitter EJB. There's 200 pages of complaints and solutions, all hinging on the fact that Sun pushed a standard before they had any applications out there that needed this kind of functionality.
Swing - Read Bitter Java. Another 200 pages saying that Sun made Swing without even trying to use it on an Office-like application.
The really funny part
This usually translates as "I don't understand all of the Java features - therefore it must be BAD.
Yes, it is very bad if your developers can't easily understand the tools they're working with. That directly leads to poor software systems that will often completely fail.
Look at the Java EE 5 API for yourself: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/api/
There are literally hundreds of interfaces and classes you'd need to understand to have a full knowledge of Java EE 5. Of course, that's in addition to the hundreds of interfaces and classes of the standard Java class library.
Just look at some of the class names. One particularly bad one is javax.faces.component.ActionSource2. Why the fuck is a class called "ActionSource2"? To me, that's a sign of very poor object design. Unfortunately, this is the sort of stuff we see throughout the Java world.
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.
I.e., if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
Yes you are right, Java is not popular at all. In fact I am always amazed at the way there are more adverts for Java jobs than just about any other skill (usually number 1 sometimes number 2) when hardly anyone uses it. I guess the companies just like paying for adverts for the fun of it.
I remember when Weblogic got support for EJB 2.0 (I think; it was a while ago now). They were much more prompt about that. They had it implemented and in production use before the standard was even done getting major changes. When we switched (for cost reasons) to JBoss, almost all of the porting effort was in porting from the intermediate version of the standard that Weblogic had implemented to the actual released version.
> Look at the Java EE 5 API for yourself: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/api/
Then when you're baffled by reading reference docs, go read the tutorial: http://java.sun.com/javaee/5/docs/tutorial/doc/
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.