Hey all,
J2EE is not dead, and EJB is getting better with every day. When you use
it to do simple things (like run examples found in books or websites), it makes
development VERY fast, and the trade off in actual performance can be
acceptable. However, the moment you try to bend the rules, you're in
COMPLETELY uncharted territory. But that's something I hope will change as
people experiment more and J2EE matures. And thats largely up to us as a
community of programmers... which is why I'm writing this email, and I think
others should contribute too.
I've only been using J2EE for about 6 months, which really has only
amounted to a few projects. I've used Borland's IAS, Jonas, Orion and JBoss.
I really like J2EE for the most part, and find certain parts of it VERY useful,
but I have some gripes. Most of the below points address EJB stuff
specifically, but some of it also applies to servlets.
I guess my major gripes, and the reasons why my team is CURRENTLY thinking
about moving away from EJB for our current project are:
A) Commercial containers are prohibitively expensive ($10k per server is ok
if you're billing a bank, but if you're making something in house for your
startup company's website, thats WAY TOO MUCH). Open Source projects are
undocumented, and often not fully mature. Let me say that I really like jBoss,
and I have convinced the powers that be at my company to use it when it becomes
kick-ass, as I know it will. Its just that often the source isn't enough of a
documentation to make development run smoothly, and there are undeniable kinks
to be worked out ;) Plus, non-Commercial products often do not come with the
same kind of customer-support (like telephone numbers) and development
utilities (debugging, etc).
B) When stuff breaks, or there are errors in development, there are SOOO
many things to look into that it becomes tiresome very fast. You don't know
how many times I've spent days banging my head against my desk because
something won't work, only to find I didn't set some obscure parameter in some
obscure file of the Open Source EJB Container Release d'Jour. This is partly
due to inconsistency among EJB containers: JBoss stores its settings one place,
IAS in another. Often times, settings are stored in down-right strange
places... For God's sake, at one point, while trying to figure out an earlyish
version of Orion, my team found that the only way to set the datasource was to
change a file that was created in a temporary directory at deploy-time!!!
But its next to impossible to pick and stick with one server, since so much
stuff is changing all the time. Sun's got the proposal for EJB 2.0 out, and
from what I hear, WebLogic is barely 1.1 compliant.
Another 'favorite' is when I get the stack-trace that's twenty to fifty
lines long with NO REFERENCE to code I wrote. IAS used to give me stack traces
full of CORBA stuff, and I'd screw around for a half a day before realizing it
had nothing to do with CORBA, it just couldn't Marshal ArrayLists. It gets
hard to tell if the problem is on your end, or in the container.
I haven't used COM, so I don't have much to say about that.
My coworker has found quick success using PHP. He complains that its a
very lame language, and not as powerful as Java, but it seems there are many
less failure modes.
But we're still using J2EE... I'm currently trying to figure out Orion,
which is still not very well documented.
-Dan
marc fleury wrote:
> > > Also, lots of projects fail... all the time. Now they are just
> > > failing while trying to use EJB :)
> >
> > And some EJB projects work too, and not small ones :), see
> > http://java.sun.com/features/2000/08/instinet.html.
>
> Try to be impartial... I used to work at SUN and I know how these things go.
> Treat them as "datapoints" from SUN decision makers if you know what I mean.
>
> Come on! I need "real life" we have so much IT people on the list with
> ongoing projects. Can we hear your failures and your successes?
>
> I for one can relate a success I had last year in a startup as a contractor
> (instill.com) where we did VB-XML-Servlet-Java-JavaDatabase. Not real-real
> hardcode j2ee but worked
>
> marc
>
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > David.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
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--
Daniel G. Koulomzin
Digital Media On Demand
244 Brighton Ave. 3rd Floor
Allston MA 02134
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