Laszlo and Will, Thank you so much for sharing! Its great to know I am not alone with my love to JavaEE.
I fell in love with it in 2003 while reading Mastering EJB II (2nd edition), XML didn't scare me at that time as I knew XPATH 2.0/XSLT and XMLSchema. By the way, there's a third edition updated to EJB 3.1, annotations, etc. Then I had a break in my programming carrier in favor of pure mathematics. In 2008-9 while again working as a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems at Java Platform Group SQE team I made up a Java EE 5 application, to monitor test job execution for Java SE, we had 10000 jobs a day running over 1000 servers spread through Saint-Petersburg and two locations in US and a bit of UK. Then a year later together with a colleague we wrote a Jenkins-like application to distribute performance test runs across several labs around the world. Later it became more focused at test results storage and analysis (as we adopted those tonns of functional tests as well), and I ended up maintaining it for 7+ years. I guess till the Java part of the local (in the days of Oracle) office was closed in 2017. In the end we had a team of 4 people, feeling that JavaEE does its job well, but we never managed to get in touch with Glassfish people at Sun and even getting some engineering support for Oracle DB took 5+ years, I think only in 2016 we got some help... I always felt it is (like a bigapp) a good proof that JavaEE really works. I'm really amazed that Payara finally made it to a fully clustered App server setting, people say they have seamless green/blue deployments there with a cluster of 2-3 payara servers. I wish we could also get a clustered PostgreSQL or an equivalent... (PostgreSQL offering, say, in Google cloud seems to be nice, scalable, auto backed-up, but not clustered, it seems Oracle Autonomous DB can now do it, but I never had chance to try Oracle Cloud and have no idea how expensive it is, probably, not so much... Oh, and it seems there's also Google's Spanner DB). Nikita. On Tue, 12 Jan 2021 at 03:44, Will Hartung <willhart...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 3:54 PM Som Lima <somplastic...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> Nevertheless why is there a popularity tilt towards spring.io ? >> > > Because it's popular. Popularity breeds popularity. > > JEE being standards based has always been hindered by the standards > process. You can't do anything "quickly" by committee, especially > committees with commitments by very large organizations. > > So, JEE, despite it's innovations, has always been "behind" things like > Hibernate and Spring. JEE borrows and is inspired by developments in those, > among others, projects as well. > > Spring is a single company, and original just a single vision, so was able > to move much more quickly. It was also "second adopter" effect in that it > was able to respond to early JEE which was very formal, and relied upon a > lot of governance in things like XML and such. JEE is REALLY powerful, and > has always been quite powerful, but many applications don't quite need that > power. So the flexibility of JEE can get in the way and make doing things > more laborious. > > Of course, that has changed much over the years, but Spring was able to > hold on by doing the job, having some "outsider" street cred, and, plus, > early on, it was "free". JBoss was the only real competitor in the EJB > space for a free server early on. Spring just needed Tomcat. > > Modern JEE, with tools like Wildfly and Payara, is in a great place. Even > with the upheaval of Oracle clinging to the javax namespace and the whole > "renaming" nonsense that stalled JEE for 1-2 years, it's till in a good > place because it started in a good place. It's super stable. It's honestly > a feature that stuff that has worked for 15-20 years is still working in > modern, maintained systems. > > But other advances, such as the micro profile, is keeping JEE current for > the more simplified use cases of just being a JSON RPC host deployed to a > container in the cloud. > > Mind, I'm a JEE guy. I've always been a JEE guy. I was giddy when Sun came > out and gave away Sun Enterprise Server v8, which was the prequel to > Glassfish. (GF was a rewrite.) I liked the idea of teams being able to use > the Sun Server for departmental applications in house without have to cough > up 100's of thousands of dollars for licenses. > > Make no mistake, JEE is, and was, powerful kit. Companies used to build > vast applications around Transaction Servers, and Transaction Servers were > niche and expensive. JEE gave Transaction Servers to everyone. > > I never warmed to JBoss back in the day. I never warmed to Hibernate. I > never warmed to Spring. Can't say why. Complexity, documentation, who > knows. I saw Spring as mostly equivalent to JEE, but JEE was running on > JBoss, Weblogic, WebSphere, Glassfish, and a host of other implementations > where Spring was just Spring. > > JEE is easy to use and robust. JAX-RS with CDI and Transactional Session > Beans backed disparate databases with pooled connections are a perfect > storm of modern productivity. > > NetBeans has always been a great JEE citizen, I can not speak to IntelliJ. > NB has had great support, has wizards to do much of the bit twiddling > lifting that needed to be done in JEE (less so today), and has always > worked well with the servers, especially Glassfish and Payara. I can > heartily recommend them both together. > > When we see all this talk about containers, kubernetes, dockers, etc. etc. > All of this infrastructure and "devops" that people use today, appreciate > that the App Server was there first. The AppServer running on the JVM was > the container. (We've always called Glassfish et al "the container"). You > set up the app server, you deploy to it, magic happens. With a dependency > on a the JVM, AppServer can be easy to deploy (they still need to be tuned, > different problem). > > But the modern containers have APIs to handle things like deploys from the > command line, and it's easy to use without a zillion lines of YAML or > whatever or an entire staff to maintain the infrastructure. > > The modern containers and such have their place to be sure, but aren't > absolutely required to deploy a WAR or an EAR. Stand up the app server, add > a JDBC jar, configure some DB connection pools, and you're off and running > for a vast range of applications. > > Bit of a fan, even after 20 years with this stuff, I still love JEE and > its potential. > > Regards, > > Will Hartung > >
