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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."

8 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. SAP by ut.linuxer · · Score: 5, Informative

    SAP released a Java EE 5 compatible application server a few weeks ago.

  2. If Java 1.4 works for you.... by Jason+Hood · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    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:If Java 1.4 works for you.... by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Java 5/6 (not J2EE 5) has some very important enhancements to its concurrency support. Under the right circumstances and if you know what you are doing they can accelerate your application by 50% or more. There are also some nice debugging tool improvements that especially improve profiler performance over Java 1.4.

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

      This article is about Java EE 5, not the JDK. While it is true that Java EE 5 will require JDK 5, they are not the same thing. J2EE 5 brings significant developer productivity enhancements many stemming from the use of annotations. Alot of this comes from the EJB3 spec, which makes J2EE persistence actually usable vs the old spec (don't take this as a flame, I'm currently waking up from the nightmare that has been my last 3 years of EJB 2 development.) I think that J2EE 5 will be a good step for organizations that can't yet embrace the lightweight develoment model that spring (and others) provides for whatever reason.

    4. Re:If Java 1.4 works for you.... by nuzak · · Score: 5, Informative

      1.5 added more than just generics, and the bytecode format really is not compatible, so there really isn't much they can do about it.
          Use retroweaver to get 1.5 features and annotations in 1.4 code -- http://retroweaver.sourceforge.net/

      > There's no reason Java should require 500MB, but that's the size of my Java directory

      You have something pretty funny going on there. My jdk1.6 install is 178 megs. I didn't download the separate docs tho, which do add loads and loads of space. Most of the JDK comes with source anyway, and eclipse pulls javadoc right out of source, so I saw little need for it.

      Not that 178 megs is small, but I think as long as the full JDK weighs in under 200 megs, it's doing all right.

      Now glassfish (the JEE5 reference platform) is monstrous, but it was intended to be the kitchen sink from the start.

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  3. 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.

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  4. 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.