An internetnews article yesterday asked if Java's complexity is its worst enemy. The article started off making the case of Java's complexity and quoted Richard Monson-Haefel (author of the best selling EJB book and Burton Group analyst) saying "They should retire Java EE and work with the open source community to come up with a better solution...The Java solution is so bad people are willing to go their own way and cobble together their own framework to avoid the complexity of Java EE." The article concluded with a quote from another analyst defending Java EE saying that enterprise scale software is complex, and that "Java EE 5 has done a very good job of reducing the level of complexity, but it's still complex, and that's how it's got to be."
Steve Anglin distilled the the problem to a simpler question: "Is the new lightweight Java EE 5 light enough?", and turns the conversation to questioning whether organizations care about standards or alternate light weight frameworks:
...how important are standards to your client’s and/or company’s requirements these days? For example, the Spring Framework and Ruby on Rails may not be considered standards compliant. At least, Sun, JBoss and others don’t think these are, and that Java EE 5 is standards compliant...Standards keep specs and implementations stable, secure, and keeps these from going obsolete... Which [stack] do you prefer?
Steve is inviting people on his blog to comment on their favourite stack, add your thoughts. Comments so far were that Spring is standards compliant, that standards tend to be driven by tool vendors to sell more product, etc. Similar discussions were had on the future of enterprise Java panel, and the role of tools vendors in standards definitions also emerged in a discussion between Craig McClanahan and others in an InfoQ thread about Struts and Shale parting ways. Accused that JSF's purpose is to drive tools vendors, Craig clarified:
Steve Anglin distilled the the problem to a simpler question: "Is the new lightweight Java EE 5 light enough?", and turns the conversation to questioning whether organizations care about standards or alternate light weight frameworks:
...how important are standards to your client’s and/or company’s requirements these days? For example, the Spring Framework and Ruby on Rails may not be considered standards compliant. At least, Sun, JBoss and others don’t think these are, and that Java EE 5 is standards compliant...Standards keep specs and implementations stable, secure, and keeps these from going obsolete... Which [stack] do you prefer?
Steve is inviting people on his blog to comment on their favourite stack, add your thoughts. Comments so far were that Spring is standards compliant, that standards tend to be driven by tool vendors to sell more product, etc. Similar discussions were had on the future of enterprise Java panel, and the role of tools vendors in standards definitions also emerged in a discussion between Craig McClanahan and others in an InfoQ thread about Struts and Shale parting ways. Accused that JSF's purpose is to drive tools vendors, Craig clarified:
JSF apps can be hand authored just as easily as apps in your favorite action oriented MVC framework. JSF was, *in addition*, designed to make it easy to support with tools. The proof is in the pudding ... besides the existing IDE support for hand authoring JSF apps that is equivalent to what you'll see for frameworks like Struts, you also get to choose from IDEs focused on visual development if you like that approach.