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Spring, JavaEE, who is the standard? ;)

 
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Hello dear Spring Lovers and Gurus,

for some time I'm involved into porting a rather big and complex near-real-time system with asynchronous bus and clustering from EJB2 to EJB3, changing application container by the way (from weblogic to jboss). While doing main parts of that job I have come up with some thesis:
- EJB (be it 2 or 3) development is so implementation specific that system, once developed for one of application container and efficiently working, can "stuck" in most unpredictable part of processing even after rather accurate porting
- we have to use implementation specific things in any case (security, deployment structure), especially when it comes to efficiency
- moreover sometimes even architectural principles (that were efficient before) have to be changed because of the specifics of new application container
- why bother with standard-dependency and be afraid of 3rd-party-lib usage as "one more dependency" and/or "possibly unstable part of the system"

Now about what I think how Spring influences the situation:
- Spring covers most of the parts of J2EE standards (not to mention field and tremendous integration were EE has nothing to say)
- from my experience and guesses, if Spring is more lightweight, and gives (almost) the same services, I could replace most SessionBeans with SpringBeans gaining more Spring advantages than loosing EE ones
- you could say "and how about EE clustering features" I think "they are implementation specific" - so much work to convince JBoss to behave as before on Weblogic, and lost ALL of the simplifying features of EJB3 - all through JNDI, strong typecasting, etc.

I have a constant feeling that if we've used Spring as a core we wouldn't have those standards-compatibility issues.

So isn't the Spring more like a standard nowadays? It gained its position. Became a de-facto standard. At least for some category of projects, in some development processes, group of developers (the dynamic ones).
I'm so sad that this is not my situation.
 
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Yaroslav Novytskyy wrote:So isn't the Spring more like a standard nowadays? It gained its position. Became a de-facto standard.


Yes. Good post on the current state of affairs.

And welcome to JavaRanch!
 
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While I agree with the gist of your post, I don't really think Spring can be called lightweight any more. Maybe in terms of server infrastructure (doesn't need a full JEE server), but not so much in terms of development impact, now that JEE has copied so much of the good that is in Spring.
 
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Hello,

I would be interested in a (very) detailed comparison between spring and ejb 3. And probably not just me, since it's a hot debate nowadays.
 
Yaroslav Novytskyy
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Ulf Dittmer wrote:I don't really think Spring can be called lightweight any more


Yes, that is my concern too. I even said once to my team-mates (in terms of the same described above project) that "we missed the Spring era"
But I still hope to be wrong. And would be glad if someone will prove this or opposite statement here.

Ulf Dittmer wrote:now that JEE has copied so much of the good that is in Spring


With that I can't agree - and that is the part of the sense of my post.

Nick Potter wrote:I would be interested in a (very) detailed comparison between spring and ejb 3


Sorry, but I can't be relevant source here - not enough Spring knowledge and experience.

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:And welcome to JavaRanch!


Thanks for the warm welcome, though I'm a reader here already for a long time
 
Ulf Dittmer
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Yaroslav Novytskyy wrote:

Ulf Dittmer wrote:now that JEE has copied so much of the good that is in Spring


With that I can't agree - and that is the part of the sense of my post.


You don't think that JEE 6 -with DI and JPA- has become more Spring-like?
 
Yaroslav Novytskyy
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Ulf Dittmer wrote:You don't think that JEE 6 -with DI and JPA- has become more Spring-like?


I do!
But, sorry for being rudely obvious, I think that Spring is much more Spring-like than JEE.
I'll try a more explanatory answer:
- Spring still has a lot more to offer in simplification of code, integration with other layers, services to offer in Application/Domain layers as well as other;
- What was adopted from Spring is great and simplifies development, but only were standard forces it, there are places beyond standard (especially in advanced parts of systems) on implementation level of different application containers, that do not have easiness of EJB3, and they make you fall back to using old methods
- ...and from the other hand Spring is "standard for itself" what excludes problems described in prev point

Let me add a point (maybe it's a summary of my concern):
JEE6 standard (including it's convenient simplifications) did not cover advanced topics enough to let developer use them all around just sticking to this standard
 
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