As you said, these are all opinions which are always driven by our own personal experiences. I do want to give a bit of background on my experiences, how they have effected my opinion, and why I as well as so many at Cynergy Systems are enamored with Flex, and why we build applications the way we do.
I have been developing Java since Duke danced across my Mosaic Browser while working as a Faculty researcher at UMD (Go Terps!). I was a Principal Architect at Sybase for one of the first J2EE branded application servers. I was involved in the development not only of J2EE applications, but the actual direction of the specification itself since version 0.4 way back in 1998. I am a three time speaker at JavaOne on subjects like "Advanced Transaction Processing in J2EE" (Google it, the presentation is still wandering the net) as well as CORBA, clustering etc. I also was a product manager at that little startup in Redmond WA. I have plenty of experiences to draw on to build my opinion. My opinion is EJB was a good try, a valiant attempt, and in the end an over-architected failure. I often say someday when I am rich and famous and write my memoirs I will apologize for ever driving EJB. EJB is too heavy, too over architected and designed for a software ISV mentality that never fit the intended market of business applications developers. Fine, its scalable, powerful, robust, open API's, standards based, blah blah. The root issue is that mere mortals cannot be productive in it. Just writing HelloWorld could take you hours in EJB. I know you point out CMP (Container Managed Persistence for your flexers) as being an advantage of EJB. Actually if I could point to a single monstrous failure in EJB it was CMP. Its architecturally flawed. The finder() design is a memory hog, the ejb query syntax is bizarre and incredibly limiting, the whole assumption that the database will not remain consistent if you allow any other application outside CMP to access it is ridiculous (Google Distributed Diamonds), etc. Trust me, if CMP were so amazing why is it that EJB3's CMP model is effectively just Hibernate? And why do you have a quote from the JBoss group? Well maybe because Hibernate is *their* project. EJB3's implementation means they're invention is being pushed. Heck, lets look at JBoss for a moment. They realized EJB apps were so hard to build and maintain they built an entire company around providing consulting for their *free* server. That should shoot alarm bells up right away. All you have to do is go to a former EJB Mecca like TheServerSide (TSS is kinda like the EJB version of FlexCoders) to see that those guys have changed lock stock and barrel to servlet based solutions like Spring, Hibernate, Tapestry, JSF etc. That place used to be *the* EJB discussion forum and those three letters are like rat poison there. To us at Cynergy Systems software is about people and their user experience. Its about getting software in peoples hands quickly, for a reasonable price and in as simple an environment as possible. To me EJB does none of that. Mixing a Flex UI with a simple container, a powerful persistence layer, state machine, etc is the right solution. I've been in the trenches with EJB, possibly more then pretty much most people, and I can tell you, I'm hard pressed to bring a client there again. I want to provide my clients with an affordable, scalable rich application they can maintain. To me that is *not* EJB. Just my $0.02. (Although I think its worth closer to a buck twenty five or so butÂ…) -- Dave Wolf Cynergy Systems, Inc. Macromedia Flex Alliance Partner http://www.cynergysystems.com Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Office: 866-CYNERGY ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/nhFolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
