Originally posted by Richard Hawkes:
I'm having big problems getting my head round J2EE stuff. We're forced to use it for even the simplist of apps which seems like a huge overkill to me. I'd much rather be using PHP/MySQL but if I want to stay where I am I have no choice Good experience and a CV filler I guess.
If you can do the job without the full J2EE platform by all means do so.
You don't HAVE to use the entire platform to create web applications, despite what many EJB centric books tell you.
I've created many a webapp using
Servlets, JSP and regular beans with some (usually home brewn) persistence framework, pretty much what you'd do with PHP as well.
I don't touch EJB unless absolutely required. It is indeed a bloated needlessly complex technology and overkill for most projects (a 2001 Gartner study showed that in 2000 in the US alone companies had thrown away at least $2 billion by using EJB for applications that didn't need them), but again its use is not mandated by the platform (only by CEOs and project managers who think it looks good on the specsheet and/or their resume).