Ben Christen's Blog

Beware the Enterprise abduction of POJOs, REST and AJAX

POJOs, REST, AJAX. These acronyms are big buzz words -- and buzz is good, it brings needed exposure -- but, I fear too much hype will bring lack of understanding.

POJOs are a revolt against the complexity of EJBs! I love the ironic intent of the POJO acronym -- maybe my boss will give credence to my ideas if I use a fancy acronym (oooh, wait a second . . . AJAX). The POJO acronym now appears everywhere. There are even POJO books! But aren't plain old java objects already covered in the first chapters of every Java book? Maybe I'm mistaken and everyone really gets it, but I fear that isn't always true.

REST is a revolt against the complexity of SOAP! When I first read about REST, I thought, "Yes! Of course! This is how we were doing web services before all that SOAP nonsense." I love the simplicity. I'm very happy to see toolkits emerging now that will help us develop REST webservices. But, let's not forget that it's just JAVA, XML and HTTP.

Ah, AJAX. Something that already existed, which we had no idea existed, then Google opened our eyes and HTTPXMLRequest was re-branded AJAX. I love the acronym and believe that it's a large part of AJAX's success and quick adoption. But, again, I'm worried about the Enterprise Abduction. There is SO much AJAX buzz at JavaOne. Let's hope for Enterprise Adoption instead of Abduction.

There is definitely substance behind these buzz words. Unfortunately there isn't always substance behind the people using the buzz words! We owe a huge thanks to those who put the substance there. You're the ones who make it happen -- the rest of us are just talk.

Comments

• "POJOs are a revolt against the complexity of EJBs!"

  I would agree with that but the side effect is to push the complexity down inside the frameworks where you can't see it but can get burnt by it because you no longer (can) understand it. In a number of cases I see POJO's as an embodiment of Java programmers wanting to write simple Java code and leave the difficult stuff to someone else. They don't want to think about design or anything else, just write easy code.

  Pushing complexity down into frameworks might well mean the complexity manifests itself elsewhere - e.g. horridly verbose configuration.

  Personally, I'm much more interested in design philosophies like convention over configuration which can lead to simpler design and code as a result rather than starting from a code principle and attempting to drive that back up into some form of philosophy.
  

  Posted by: dancres on May 19, 2006 at 03:06 AM

• Great point! No acronym is a silver bullet and the logic has to be somewhere. Now that I'm rested I can think of a better analogy -- We have political party X in power with their level of corruption. Political party Y revolts against the corruption of X and gains some power, only to bring their own corruption. And, being a big fan of party Y's politics, it's a bit aganizing to see that corruption and realize that my party isn't perfect either.

  Posted by: benchristen on May 19, 2006 at 09:03 AM

• I find it funny how POJO is the hypesters borrowing of the acronym POTS, which stands for plain-old telephone system. That term was coined by Bell telephone engineers, in the late 19th century. So AJaX isn't nearly the oldest thing that can be made to seem new, with hype.

  Posted by: cajo on May 19, 2006 at 09:46 AM

• Cool!

  Posted by: benchristen on May 19, 2006 at 10:11 AM

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