Shahzad Bhatti Welcome to my ramblings and rants!

May 16, 2007

J2EE Bashing

Filed under: Computing — admin @ 8:32 am

Ever since Spring/Hibernate came about in early 2000, there has been increasingly bashing on J2EE. I saw another post on similar topic from Dan CresWell. He questions using J2EE to mean many things and using J2EE in resumes. I have been doing distributed programming for over ten years from BSD sockets, to Java, CORBA, EJB, JINI, Messaging, etc. I found J2EE containers were a great improvements over their predecessors. Though, I agree that J2EE umbrella means a lot of things to different people, and we should be using real words to describe enterprise level concerns such as deployment, monitoring, networking, concurrency, etc. For any large enterprise systems, the need for monitoring, scaling, security and availability are very critical. J2EE created a abstraction for developers for writing enterprise and distributed programming by implementing internal threading, transactions, security, remoting, and monitoring (JMX). Needless to say, it was mistake to create that abstraction layer that forced developers to forget about the realities of underlying system. However, things like monitoring, hot deployment, security and high availability should only be managed in a container or centralized way. These problems are really hard and I have not seen any reliable solutions outside commercial space. These problems are best handled at architecture level rather than at implementation level such as using J2EE. I still see large organizations use J2EE in one way or the other. Though, they may be using some in-house frameworks for monitoring, deployment, etc. For example, many large companies use many stateless services, which are managed independently. In a lot of cases, a database or memory server is used for state. Such architecture can lend itself easily for high availability. For example, at Amazon or Ebay, the site is backed by many many services and at any time, one or more service may be restarting, but it does not effect most of the users.

Dan also raises question about putting J2EE in resumes to get more responses. I find most companies use keyword search for finding matching candidate, but it’s mistake. You can never rely on some computer program to present you the matching candidates. You will have to read the resumes and talk to the people to learn if they understand these concepts and have relevant experience.

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