Re: Java to die in 2003

Nuno Souto <nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam> wrote in message news:<3e0d4769$0$7817$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au>...

> Precisely. And let me stress: this "duality" comes from the J2EE crowd
> every single time, IME. Not once are they willing to accept that there
> is a little bit more about databases than just what JDBC has.

Sadly, yes. (I'm a J2EE guy trying to fight this bullshit).

> If it's not in the example cookbook provided by WSAD and IBM in a
> deranged red book somewhere, they don't even want to hear about it...

That in itself is the root of the problem: the J2EE "crowd" is largely a bunch of recent college grads that jumped onto a bandwagon by reading the specifications/redbooks, and not having a whole heck of a lot of engineering expertise.

There are exceptions, and I have seen passable J2EE applications. But they usually were led by a very experienced guiding hand.

> > Stored procedures
> > aren't evil.
>
> Tell that to J2EE "God" Scott Ambler & Co. And the Jakarta mob...

I think the Jakarta mob is a bit too diverse to really label... Scott Ambler has his reasons for disliking stored procs, though I have no problems using them if they're warranted.

A lot of the J2EE mob is well-intended. I know the sysop (Floyd) of theserverside.com rather well (I helped hire him before he started the site) and he really just wants to do the most maintainable & performant solution when he wrote his "EJB Design Patterns" book. The real issue seems to be that there isn't a whole lot of momentum in understanding database management. Which is silly really, anything to gain you success in your project is going to lead to the real form of glory: a c.v. of finished, successful projects.

Another observation is that there hasn't been a developer-targeted book that actually explains Oracle's design in detail... That is, until Tom Kyte's book came along, which I believe should be mandatory reading for any J2EE developer.

And finally, there's the bastardized school of thought that "design purity" should come over a performing system, care of those that brought you the J2EE Petstore and the stellar (ugh) benchmarks vs. .NET. That whole mess says more about culture to me and less about technology... With the Microsoft culture looking a hell of a lot more practical (which is a welcome departure from the list of crazily complicated technologies that came out of that realm for years).

> Narh! That would be too easy.
> Eschew simplicity is the middle name of J2EE...
> :(

Just one thought here, J2EE is not EJB. EJB is a demon-spawned (i.e. CORBA) technology that tries to do too much, all poorly. J2EE otoh, has some relatively simple approaches to reliable messaging, large-scale web dev, assuming people don't unnecessarily complicate things.

Sun's blueprints of course don't help matters, but they really can't -- it's rather difficult to distill engineering expertise into a whitepaper or set of patterns. Patterns can help, but they're dangerous in the hands of newbies (oh oh, look! we can apply the abstract factory and visitor pattern here! that way we can iterate through 10,000 objects instead of having to write a SQL statement!)

Cheers
Stu Received on Sat Dec 28 2002 - 06:19:50 CST