Thursday, April 12, 2007

Cannot agree with Monson-Haefel about J2EE future

This is reply to original article Analysts see Java EE dying in an SOA world. Monson-Haefel is his article compares J2EE with Ruby-on-Rails. Ruby-on-Rails is a Web application framework thus this comparison is just like between a bike and a luxury car. It is wrong by definition. While more and more specs, JSRs and technologies (also come from J2EE) move to J2SE (just take a look at J2SE 6.0) are we going to expect the death to Java?! As Monson-Haefel sad, 'No', so why he is contradicts to himself? Btw, why CORBA is dead? We still use it in our mainframe integration :-) . Does the CORBA look complicated for you? As for me CORBA is most simplest technology ever exists in IT. If CORBA is die-hard for Monson-Haefel then despite of the honor to all his books I've no comments to the rest of the article at all :-) Are all those analysts talking about complexity of the J2EE from the application server implementation point of view? At this point I ready to agree with them. It is pretty hard to build J2EE5 server from scratch. But at the moment we have at least two even OpenSource implementations which work just fine (Glass Fish and JBoss). As for developers it is all about the way of use. Just take those parts form J2EE which are required for you project, then in most cases it will be 10% of all J2SE/J2EE stack. Is it hard to lean how-to use 10% of the complicated thing? It is just enough to read introduction to J2EE and define the needed parts and then follow the table of content to refer to actual information you need. Yep, J2SE/J2EE is a huge stack of technologies, but please look at it as a set of ready to plug and use patterns and then it won't be more complicated then GOF for ya!