Comments on: EJB maintains its dominance

By: billburke

billburke — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:29:42 +0000

Mark, I believe if the right people get on these committees you can really change things. EE5 was JBoss’s first foray into specification work. It took a huge battle to get JPA (and thus Hibernate) standardized and finally we have a string persistence model in EE while at the same time unifying Hibernate, JDO, and CP crowds.

I don’t think open source is isolation enough. We need standards so that new players can push the old.

And no what I mean by core middleware is: persistence, transactions, messaging, caching, networking (web server/remoting). Everything else is just putting a pretty face on these core technologies. Even when it is a specification.

By: Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:16:30 +0000

Bill,

I guess it’s just a difference of opinion, but I personally don’t understand the infatuation with standards for the sake of standards. My opinion on that matter changed at some point around the EJB spec’s 2nd attempt at CMP. When I consider EJB3’s @Interceptor approach, I can’t say that things have gotten any better. Anyways, Spring provides a model that allows developers to focus on business logic that is isolated from the infrastructure, and in my mind, that is the defining characteristic of middleware. Clearly, a growing community of developers recognize that the Spring portfolio offers pragmatic solutions beyond standards and specifications (Web Services, Security, Batch, etc). On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that your definition of “core middleware” assumes implementation of a specification as a requirement, and therefore this is a circular argument.

-Mark

By: billburke

billburke — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 05:35:52 +0000

Mark, please enlighten me on what core middleware service Spring implements? (or EJB for that matter). Spring isn’t even a full fledged kernel and needs OSGi to fill the gaps. This is what I mean by kiddy. A bunch of low hanging fruit that anybody could implement. Still, Java EE needs a kiddy layer to make it sexy, usable, and integratable. Right now we have a fracture in which one side is standards based and the other controlled by one commercial/VC driven company. I’ll choose and fight for standards every time.

By: openBlog » Spring vs Jboss war continues

openBlog » Spring vs Jboss war continues — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:59:21 +0000

[...] ago, I wrote about an Open Source War? Spring+Tomcat vs Jboss, which seems to continue in this post written by Bill Burke. The battle ground is EJB, that’s why it looks like Spring or EJB. However, I believe [...]

By: Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 04:32:47 +0000

Bill,

Don’t you think it’s a bit paradoxical to imply that standardizing Spring would be “making Java EE better” while simultaneously calling it a “kiddy wrapper”? To be honest, as a core Spring committer trying to provide the best possible environment for developers while recognizing deficiencies in the EJB 3 specification, I take offense at such comments. Perhaps you can provide some enlightenment?

-Mark

By: joris wijlens

joris wijlens — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:01:57 +0000

I agree with the last two posts. I both used spring and ejb 3.0 I like both and I am in debt to such good programmers that provided me with high quality, free to use frameworks. But I what I don’t understand is that the people that created such good software (far better than I can), show such unprofessional behaviour towards each other. I had hoped for more collaborative behaviour at least a constructive discussion. These kind of discussions (I’ve seen more of these lately) don’t benefit us at all I think.

Peace (to quote another well respected colleague of ours)

By: Dalton Camargo

Dalton Camargo — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:19:51 +0000

I’m addicted by Spring, I’ve started the first forum system in java based on Spring. But my humble opinion is that we have to stop with this vision that Spring vs EJB and so forth. I see many people talking the goals and news about Rails, Groovy and so forth and what we are talking about our core (Java) ?? Today we have many companies working in JEE plataform ok, but in the future? Probably our IT Directors will see these fights today and in the near future, we will have many projects working based on Rails, why? Directors don’t like fights, they have afraid by instable tecnologies.. While this, Ruby on Rails still getting growing around the opensource projects..
It seens that old fight (Visual Basic vs Delphi), but now we are talking with the same plataform but it seens different languages..
Rod, don’t you think that is time to see with the Sun guys propose for Spring? We need some focus in our plataform.

By: Pulak De

Pulak De — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:54:24 +0000

Bill, I completely agree with you on this.

“Unfortunately, when you finally wake up and see that uniting Spring with Java EE/EJB is a good thing for everybody, the Rails movement will have already made us all obsolete. Sigh.”

I’m a enterprise developer and have used Java/JEE technologies for years. I can see why many organisations are confused with these standards/framework “war” in Java community every year. First people get confused with all these propaganda, marketing, and FUD and start using (misusing?) this kind of framework without proper evaluation. Later they realize those are not enterprise ready and start dumping it. I believe enteprise projects are much more than just a framework and DI or AOP. It needs end to end visibility and strong vendor support. This made .NET popular in recent past. It is high time Java community realize Spring and JEE unification must happen sooner than later. We must learn this from JPA and Hibernate. Let us stop comparing charts for EJB and Spring job trends and make a step forward together.

By: George Jiang

George Jiang — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:13:18 +0000

“EJB3, which is a completely different thing. As I said in another place, I think they only keep the EJB name to not embarrass the creators of EJB2…”

EJB3 still has stateless session bean, stateful session bean, 2.0 enity bean and message driven bean.

By: Scott P

Scott P — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 23:02:25 +0000

Speaking as an enterprise Java developer, I’m glad Spring hasn’t folded itself under Java EE. A lot of us don’t have the luxury of running app servers that support the latest and greatest in Java EE. For example, at the large company I work for, we run WebSphere 6.0. ‘Nuff said.

Spring lets us use advanced techniques independent of IBM’s upgrade schedule. That’s a very good thing.