[Q]How to minimize damage done by Java

I am currently doing a redesign of one of our products an I am very happy that I have a chance to do this. But company policies have moved on in the meanwhile and apart from all sorts of ISO9000 and CMM nuisances I am forced to use out now SD standards.

These include a 3tier architechture with Java GUIs (fine with me) a Jave middle tier with Enterprise Java Beans and an application server and an oracle backend that has been deprived of all the good things a database can do (basically multi-user persistency: transcation handling, locking, rollback and the paradigm of keeping behavior close to the data (triggers and storerd procedures)).

The session beans are "stateless", you cannot roll back in a safe way, you cannot even be sure that your commit will be successful because data is first stored in the middle tier. If the middle tier was a full blown database engine then yes, but we are worlds away from that, I believe.

Now I don't know this Java stuff at all, so I cannot even say it's bad. But somehow it smells funny. It is the way these people talk. As if it was a major feat to display a button that inserts a row in a table. I have millons of rows and hundreds of concurrent users.

The technology was intruduced in a multi-millon Dollar project that is not yet finished. This project also produced a "framework" that we will have to use. One of the components developed is (really !) a tree widged that can be customized by data from the database. I've seen this "forced synergy" pattern before and the results have always been mediocre or devastating.

Smalltalk is not an option. But maybe there are other ways of minimizing the damage caused by this aproach. Or maybe you tell me that my perception is entirely wrong and that we're heading the right direction. Received on Thu Dec 19 2002 - 16:19:38 CST