Tuesday, November 7. 2006
Defending the complexity of J2EE?
I just stumbled across this article that claims to defend the complexity of J2EE.
The interesting part to me is the assumption that these technologies are part of J2EE. In fact, none of them are. Not one.
ANT solves a problem not addressed at all by the J2EE spec. Struts and Tiles were built to sit on top of servlets (which are part of J2EE) and to provide a framework that was missing from J2EE. Hibernate is an alternative for the flawed1 persistence model in J2EE. Spring was designed to counter the complexity that was overtaking J2EE. Same for XDoclet. AOP is an attempt to make Java itself more powerful and is not used at all by J2EE.
J2EE is getting bashed for good reason. The core spec doesn't do what most people need and consequently a large number of frameworks, like the ones above, have been created to build upon, and sometimes work around, the platform. Many of these frameworks are quite good, however, none of them are actually part of the J2EE specification.
1 EJB3 fixes the main issues with J2EE persistence, however, adoption of EJB3 is slow and I expect the majority of the market to be stuck on EJB2.x for quite some time.
J2EE was simple again! Wait… but that’s not true… I must be loosing my mind! How can all the stuff mentioned above; ANT build files, Struts, Tiles, Hibernate, Spring, AOP, XDoclet… be simple? Well it’s not if you wake up to it TODAY and look at it. However, looking back over the years, J2EE has evolved, introducing new stuff each time solving an even more complex problem. Stuff that now seems complex when taken in as a whole.
The interesting part to me is the assumption that these technologies are part of J2EE. In fact, none of them are. Not one.
ANT solves a problem not addressed at all by the J2EE spec. Struts and Tiles were built to sit on top of servlets (which are part of J2EE) and to provide a framework that was missing from J2EE. Hibernate is an alternative for the flawed1 persistence model in J2EE. Spring was designed to counter the complexity that was overtaking J2EE. Same for XDoclet. AOP is an attempt to make Java itself more powerful and is not used at all by J2EE.
J2EE is getting bashed for good reason. The core spec doesn't do what most people need and consequently a large number of frameworks, like the ones above, have been created to build upon, and sometimes work around, the platform. Many of these frameworks are quite good, however, none of them are actually part of the J2EE specification.
1 EJB3 fixes the main issues with J2EE persistence, however, adoption of EJB3 is slow and I expect the majority of the market to be stuck on EJB2.x for quite some time.
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