Simon Brown's Blog

Where are all the J2EE 1.4 implementations?

It's still relatively early days for J2EE 1.4 in the real world, but compare the number of J2EE 1.4 implementations (6) with the number of J2EE 1.3 implementations (21). I remember that prior to the final J2EE 1.3 release, vendors seemed to be falling over themselves to get their implementations out but this doesn't seem to be happening anymore. Most J2EE app servers have some ability to support web services (the key addition for J2EE 1.4) so I'd be surprised if the lack of implementations is due to the complexity involved. Even JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 containers were fairly thin on the ground until recently. What do you think?

Comments

• I think it's likely that we'll simply see fewer J2EE servers, period, as a natural part of consolidation and attrition, and--to a lesser extent--migration to .NET. The fact is, the market only needs and can support so many J2EE vendors.
  The J2EE spec itself makes these servers a commodity, so prices and margins will continue to fall, making it less attractive for new players to enter the space and less possible for smaller players to remain profitable.
  This is a natural phenomenon for any maturing market.

  Posted by: jimothy on November 03, 2004 at 06:33 AM

• I don't think it has to do so much with .NET as demand. 1.3 has been pretty stable and successful for big shops. Also, can you justify reengineering a project just for a 1.4 label? A lot of the hype I've seen so far has to do with client sections, not the server.

  Don't flame me yet, not saying they aren't great,amazing things for 1.4 but customers need to see and explain the difference, not just nerd talk explaining it.

  Posted by: smartinumcp on November 03, 2004 at 07:29 AM

• My guess is that the vendors are just too busy building the stuff they actually make (or hope to make) money on: tools for administration and management of complex app server farms, integration, workflow, portals, high availability, etc.

  And the second problem is that everybody knows that most of the old and new EJB functionality in J2EE 1.4 will essentially be depricated in J2EE 1.5. or rather it will made accessible to developers in a radically different way (annotations, the new persistence model, etc). Even the web services functionality is second rate on the EJB side compared to Servlet based JAX-RPC web services. So from an EJB standpoint, I see little incentive to upgrade.

  Where things really happen in 1.4 is JSP 2.0, Servlet 2.4 and to some degree web services. JSP 2.0 is a real improvement and a much better basis for JSF than JSP 1.2. In the web services area, my feeling is that what we have today in J2EE is not very well designed. It

  Posted by: ajeru on November 03, 2004 at 08:46 AM

• Simon,

  If you compare the number of J2EE 1.4 implementations to the number of J2EE 1.3 implementations in the first year, they are virtually the same. The big difference this time around is that some of the big players for J2EE 1.3 are not the leaders in J2EE 1.4.

  Back in J2EE 1.3 BEA was first to market and did quite well. Now BEA is going through tough times and can't seem to be able to ship a new version very quickly.

  When J2EE 1.3 was released, Sun was well behind the other vendors in shipping a J2EE 1.3 Compatible Implementation. This time around Sun was the first to ship a J2EE 1.4 Compatible Application Server (and it's free for deployment in production). Today almost there have been almost 2 Million dowloads of the 1.4 version, so obviously the demand is there for J2EE 1.4.

  You can expect a number of Open Source Vendors to announce that they have J2EE 1.4 Compatible implementations by the end of the year. The J2EE market is still strong and it's a whole new game for version 1.4

  Posted by: dennism on November 03, 2004 at 05:28 PM

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