Editor's Daily Blog

Running On The Spot

Does Rails' "whipitupitude" really mean EE is "dead"?

When someone posts a blog title like Is J2EE Dead?, as Brian O'Neill recently did, you really can't help but look. It's just too strong of a statement to let slide, because either he's right, which means a lot of us should be updating our resumes to emphasize our strengths in non-"dead" technologies, or he's wrong, in which case there's probably going to be a heck of a comment section.

But in this case, maybe it's a little of both? Brian starts by discussing how this blog comes from a recent presentation at the Philly JUG, in which he discussed his experiences developing webapps with Rails:

I've spent the last six months developing in Ruby (some on Rails). It quickly went from just a past time, where I was developing a silly little beer review site called liquidMirth to serious business applications (at the day job: rVooz). And now I have to admit, the compile, build, deploy cycle of a standard J2EE application seems unbelievably daunting. Combine that with the cumbersome and seemingly never ending twiddling of meta-data and deployment descriptor files required by the libraries and frameworks (e.g. Spring & Hibernate) that are supposedly helping the problem and you have an incredibly unproductive environment for web application development.

Brian goes on to say that EE != Java, and that EE is really optimized for development more intricate than the basic webapp. That theme is echoed by several of the comments. smayzak writes "A month or so ago I would have agreed with you, no question. However, now that I have spent some serious time with the Grails framework, I am falling back in love with web development in Java." And Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart follows up "The main goal of JavaEE 6 is to be able to bring a rapid development layer together with more solid foundations," noting that EE 6 will be well-suited to scripting the web tier while using EE features like web services or JMS below.

So what do you think? Does one more Rails success an EE obituary make? Or is the enterprise future more a mix and match of technologies?

Also in today's Weblogs, Kohsuke Kawaguchi has posted an entry Introducing java.net issue tracker stats. "I wrote a tool that generates pretty graphs out of java.net issue trackers. It's useful for your managers, but it's also just plain fun to look at them and try to make sense of them."

Frederic Barachant has an update from the Splines project in Interactive splined animation: first example. "Splines project now has its first incarnation within swash and the example chosen is the perfect one. In a previous blog, Tim Bourdreau asked for the difference between splines project and java.awt.GeneralPath. Here i show some of the main reasons..."

In Java Today, the recently-released Perst Lite Object-Oriented Embedded Database with ProScout Example MIDlet project offers a thorough sample app to help ME developers working with Perst Lite for object-oriented persistence. As Terrence Barr explains in a blog, "This section features information, references, and pointers about Perst Lite and includes a sample application called "ProScout" (with full source code)."

Erik Brakkee has posted a blog detailing his experiences with a Move from JBoss to Glassfish. "This migration has caused me a few problems though. I started with the most difficult application where I did a lot of work on security with JBoss. This was an application where I integrated J2EE declarative security with JAAS and tapestry. A lot of work." He also describes writing a more flexible JDBC realm in GlassFish, working through key problems in a java.net forum thread.

Blogger Patrick Curran rounds up recent Java successes in the interactive television and movie disc space in Duke Goes To Hollywood. Noting that Blu-Ray, with its Java-powered BD-J interactivity, has won the high-def disc war, he points out other Java successes. "In TV as well as movies Java is playing an important role. The North American cable industry is making a fundamental transition from set-top boxes based on proprietary technologies to set-tops, digital televisions, and related devices that support the OCAP standard. With Java ME technology as its foundation, OCAP enables new interactive TV-based applications and services such as viewer participation, interactive advertising, customized news and sports tickers, audience polling, and e-learni

In today's Forums, Anthony Petrov explains how to use new JDK6uN features in Re: Java GUI. "I guess you're compiling your code using an older JDK version. It won't work because the com.sun.awt package has only appeared since the JDK6u10b12, so older JDK versions simply have no idea about this package. Try compiling your code using the javac supplied with the newly installed JDK6u10b12, this should work."

Charlie Meyer reports on solving his own problem in Re: deploying javahelp in an applet. "I was calling the indexer from an ant build file, which was passing in a full path to the location of the helpset rather than the relative path, so when a user requested information, the help viewer was looking for a path that was unique to my machine (hence why the local copy worked properly). I was able to debug this problem by watching the web server (jetty in this case) log files for what files the applet was requesting."

Finally, ols is wondering about Adding code dynamically. "We are starting developing an application that will run in GlassFish. In big lines, this application will process (transform) messages. Each message type will have a corresponding processing type. Associations between message types and processing types will be maintain in a kind of table. My questions are: Is it possible to create a mechanism that allows users to add dynamically new processing code, by adding somewhere some java or jar files?"

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Comments

• I have just inherited a web application written in Java which has 15 xml files for hibernate, 10 for Spring and Ecache, and some for zk. There are zul files, controllers and views upon controllers and views, and then there are interfaces upon interfaces. There is no way that a human brain can cope with this complexity.

  This might have been a programmer gone awry, but the point is that even though none of the technologies by themselves is very onerous, the integration is a nightmare, and the technologies are happy to give a rope to the developer to hang himself in the name of using the latest most sophisticated framework.

  Posted by: varan on March 04, 2008 at 07:30 PM

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