Will java survive...

[Murali Mohan]

I have read two topics today
Is Java EE's Complexity Its Worst Enemy?
and Analysts see Java EE dying in an SOA world

So, Let's share our personal opinions here.

[Peter Chase]

Inevitably, new languages and ways of working will gradually push Java out of its dominant position for new applications. It will probably remain more popular in some niches than others. But Java will go on for a long time, because of the large amount of code out there needing to be maintained.

Note, however, that the articles (and other similar ones that have come out recently - these journalists are dreadful plagiarists!) are talking about Java EE, not Java in general. They say that a lot of people are choosing to use Java SE, and add the few extra bits they need, rather than use the whole huge bulk of Java EE. I feel rather smug about that, because that's what we've been doing for years! Never installed Java EE, except to get the source code for a few key bits.

[Mr. C Lamont Gilbert]

I doubt J2EE will survive. MOre than likely some projects will come out of IBM that blow it away. J2EE started as intelligent grouping of lean technologies. Today it lives for its own purpose. Its bloated and has way too many entities pulling on it. It Sun pulls back and reduces the number of interested parties that wont be good either.


Its got no where good to go AFAICT.

[Edwin Dalorzo]

I have to ask. When you say JEE, do you mean Enterprise Java Beans? Because as far as I know JEE is more than that.
[ July 19, 2006: Message edited by: Edwin Dalorzo ]

[Jeroen T Wenting]

There have been people screaming that "Java is dead" since the day it was first released now over a decade ago.
Similarly people have been screaming that "J2EE is dead" since it was released.

Neither has happened yet.

Java isn't (for the foreseeable future) going anywhere, neither is J2EE.

There's a place for EJB as well, though there the hype is now about over and the number of projects using it that would have better used something else is sharply declining.
That's actually a good thing as it reduces the negative image many people have of EJB (and many of those people seem to think that EJB are all of J2EE which is of course completely false).

[Pratibha Malhotra]

And not to forget Java's pivotal role in managing Solaris Boxes.

Solaris undoubtedly has a huge market there and in order to monotor/manages these boxes Sun is and will continue using Java based applications.

[manuel aldana]

recently there was already a discussion about this regarding J2EE.

[Charles Lyons]

Originally posted by Jeroen T Wenting:
and many of those people seem to think that EJB are all of J2EE which is of course completely false.

Indeed, and I'm actually quite surprised to see that nearly every reference to this discussion focuses solely on EJBs. I agree that the EJB architecture is bloated and an absolute nightmare to get to grips with - there are so many types of components and different extensions.

But so far, I've never onced used EJBs on a project... all my clients are looking for stable, easily (and quickly) implemented websites, and I have only ever needed to use the Web container to achieve this. I've never needed anything more than Tomcat. Plus, although there are only a few Java EE hosting companies around, the vast majority only run Web servers and not EJB containers.

Having worked with other solutions in the past (Perl, PHP and some ASP and .NET), I firmly believe Java EE Web is the best solution out there for building comprehensive sites (it can be considered excessive for small projects however). Not only does it have a great architecture, but you get the power of an entire programming language as well, unlike in PHP for instance, where you'd need to obtain further native libraries, or Perl which isn't the most pleasant thing to debug and maintain.

To add to this, J2EE 1.4 added new features to make pages really easy to work with, even for Web developers not familiar with Java (using scriptless JSPs with tags and EL); and you've only got three basic types of components: servlets, JSPs and helper classes (including tags). There's nothing else fundamentally to it! If you need additional support, build some standard Java components or JavaBeans to add that functionality.

So although opinion may say that EJB will "collapse under its own weight", I challenge the view that Java EE Web is going anywhere too quickly. Indeed, the only changes which occured between J2EE 1.4 and Java EE 5 are a few minor alterations* which most developers won't use often, which just shows how significantly the technology has matured.


* The biggest change has in fact been the addition of JSF. I'm not necessarily in favour of adding a framework such as JSF to the Java EE 5 Web specs. - I'd actually prefer to keep specific frameworks and implementations out of the core distribution, since JSF is built only using the core Servlet and JSP technologies anyway. I can see the Web tier becoming as bloated as EJB if this continues just for the sake of "adding features" to every new version of the platform. Hopefully this will not happen.

[Pratibha Malhotra]

Real time Java is the new addition to the list of applications java is the best solution for.


check out

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2002/j1-02-robots.html

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2006/05/10/real-time-java-introduction.html
[ July 27, 2006: Message edited by: Rewa Dev ]

[Arafat Nalkhande]

Well I agree with Charles Lyons that no prdictiosn can be made on the future of EJBs but JEE is there to stay. And there is no question mark whatsoever on the ever lasting future of J2SE...

!!! Long live JAVA !!!