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New Killer Star

Posted by editor on August 18, 2005 at 10:56 AM EDT

Make or break time for EJB?

Why are there alternatives to Enterprise JavaBeans? With the benefit of incumbency, not to mention marketing by the creators of Java and J2EE, EJB's should be a slam dunk. Yet many developers abandoned EJB's in recent years, in favor of alternatives, most obviously Spring, but there are others. Would these frameworks exist if not as a response to, if not rebellion against, the complexities of EJB? That's the simplistic scenario of course: some developers decided they were sick of EJB's verbosity and pomposity and decided to lighten things up. On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine these other frameworks popping up of their own accord, simply choosing different approaches, or not trying to solve all the same problems.

In other words, hating EJB is not required. You can, if you like, but it's not necessary or sufficient for being a Java enterprise developer.

Besides, EJB is changing. Version 3.0 breaks with many traditions, freeing developers from deployment descriptors, boilerplate methods, and other hassles, in favor of annotation-powered declarative programming. In today's Featured Article, What's New in EJB 3.0 Krishna Srinivasan looks at how 3.0 offers a startlingly new way to develop EJB's, while maintaining much of what's right with the existing framework.

Tom Ball has A Good Use for Finalizers in today's Weblogs: "Tom describes a way finalizer methods can be used to warn of bad code usage: what a lot of library engineers do is add a fallback routine in a finalize method to check whether a resource has been released, and if not, release it during finalization. It's an ugly hack, but often necessary to avoid granting Tumbling Duke-like powers to their client programs."

If you notice some Unmarshaller performance improvements in JAXB RI 2.0, you can thank Kohsuke Kawaguchi: "I recently rewrote the JAXB 2.0 unmarshaller in an attempt to get a better performance. I've been thinking about the design for a long time (and a jury duty helped!), so the actual implementation was easier than I thought."

David Herron is back with More looking at open source quality processes: "Like I said in my previous posting, I'm looking at the quality processes in open source projects. I'm studying how we in the Java quality team might be more open about what we're doing."

In Also in Java Today, Java Business Integration (JSR 208) defines container services that enable system integration via Web service technologies and XML message exchanges. In the interview Service-Oriented Java Business Integration, JBI Spec Lead Ron Ten-Hove discusses how JBI will impact enterprise Java developers.

In Record Movies with Java Media Framework (JMF), Gal Ratner offers an introduction to the Java Media Framework by way of an example that records video from a webcam. "The most difficult aspect of recording a movie from a webcam was making sure the proper ingredients were put in the correct order... If anyone is learning or exploring JMF, this tutorial will improve his or her working knowledge of the framework."

In Projects and Communities, the JDDAC home page notes the article Embedded Java Controllers, in which D. Jay Newman looks at Systronix Java controllers and their use for Robotics. He shows the code for a simple motor controller for R/C servos, noting that "pretty much everything in this article applies to other embedded systems as well."

"The NetBeans Profiler team is proud to announce the availability of the Profiler Milestone 8 release for NetBeans 4.1." The Profiler offers CPU, memory and threads profiling as well as basic JVM monitoring, tightly integrated into the IDE. The latest stable version can be downloaded from the Profiler project page, and is described further in a Gregg Sporar weblog.

In today's Forums, zixle describes some of his thinking Re: RowSorter and related classes: "In doing the mustang sorting/filtering API I thought long and hard on this issue, as well as talking to various folks. One of the common way to tackle sorting/filtering is to create a generic model adapter. If you want sorting, that becomes a model. If you want filtering you create a specific model for that. If you want both sorting and filtering you create two different models one wrapping the other. This approach has been proven to work. I strayed away from it for two reasons..."

fuerte wants Java to have Nullable Types (like in C# 2.0): "Please see this [article] first. This is a great new feature, which makes database programming much easier. I think that is essential, as the article says. As a side note, I wish that Java eventually gets full support for value types like int/Integer and string/String. int should be a synonym for Integer and string synonym for String. Comparing strings with == should compare the value, not the object reference. Likewise, comparing Integers with == and != should always compare the value, not the reference."

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Make or break time for EJB?
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