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Is SCBCD still a good careen path - post Rod Johnson's J2EE w/o EJB?

 
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Rod Johnson's books have undoubtedly shaken the EJB community.
And I am convinced that he is spot on about the problems with EJBs.

My question is:
Is the SCBCD material still relevant and valuable in today's (post Rod Johnson) market-place?
 
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Hi Ranch Members,
Undoubtdly, EJB has still got good scope in ,market even though outsource mkt has grew like anything. Still there is a demand for EJB technology as outsorce mkt. has no supporting /maintainance centers.


Arun
 
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Rod Johnson's books have undoubtedly shaken the EJB community.
And I am convinced that he is spot on about the problems with EJBs.


The problems with EJB 2.*. EJB 3.0 has addressed many of these issues. Other problems are not problems, just differences of opinion over architecture choices.


My question is:
Is the SCBCD material still relevant and valuable in today's (post Rod Johnson) market-place?


To my mind it was never really that relevant. About half of the SCBCD was about Entity Beans, which in my experience were a largely unused technology in professional software development (for the reasons that Rod Johnson and others point out).
 
Rick Roberts
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So, do you know of any effort to re-tool SCBCD?

Do you think it may happen soon after EJB 3.0?
 
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I spoke to some Sun officials about this on a Java conference in September, and they said they were going to alter the focus of the SCBCD away from entity beans "in the next revision, which they might be planning on doing something about in october or so". I.e. they will do something, they might already have starting by now, but not going to be available until next year. Sometime. Maybe.

I for one have decided not to take the SCBCD, as I don't want to study EntityEJB relationships and stuff just for the exam, as I won't ever be needing it. I might rethink after the new exam comes out.
 
Rick Roberts
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Interesting!

Thanks for the replys.
 
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Just for my own sanity, when you say EJBs have problems and are largely unused technology, are you talking specifically about entity beans? I don't think you you can do much for the enterprise using J2EE and not use session beans, and message-driven beans are becoming increasingly important as well.
 
Rick Roberts
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According to Rod Johnson and his disciples:

Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB

And to a lesser degree:
Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development

EJBs (all of them) are going the way of the dinosaur, in favor of the faster, lighter, light-weight frameworks such as Spring

It appears that the EJB developers at Sun agree and are working some of the issues addressed by Johnson and others in the new release of EJB 3.0.

I asked the question in hopes of hearing what folks here may know about possible upcomming changes planned for the SCBCD curiculla that might address the shortcommings of EJB in the real world.
 
Ådne Brunborg
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EJB 2.x have serious issues (such as overhead and needless complexity), and are going the way of dinosaurs. EJB 3.0 is the result of Sun realising this, and evolving the concept, in the spirit of good ol' Darwin - "evolve or die".

The main problem of EJB 2.x is that it was, by many, considered a "silver bullet" - which it obviously isn't. But neither is Spring, and although the pitfalls of Spring usage is smaller than those of EJB 2.x, they are still there. Back when 2.x came, there were no widespread frameworks the like of Spring, and EJB became the default solution to any enterprise problem.

EJB 2.x session- and message driven beans were a good idea (or rather, contains some good concepts and some bad), and they have evolved further in EJB 3.0. Entity beans were not a good idea (summary of entity beans: "a complex solution to a simple problem") and have basically been discontinued, replaced with Java Persistence API - which is rather similar to another successful Open Source framework, Hibernate.

Rod Johnsons book were written in 2004 and 2002, respectively, before the release of EJB 3.0. EJB 3.0 is mentioned briefly in the "w/o EJB" book, and I seem to recall that he wrote something like "EJB 3.0 was started before the final release of EJB 2.1, so Sun are well aware of the problems and will be adressing them in 3.0". (Paraphrased from memory, I don't have the book available at the moment. Please correct me if I am wrong.)

With frameworks like Spring available, it is to be hoped that EJB 3.0 will be used as intended, and light-weight frameworks like Spring will be used where EJBs are not needed.
 
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