Last week I picked up the PDF version of Sun's free JavaEE 5 tutorial. I saw that it was one thousand pages long, so since then I've been procrastinating about reading it. And I'm writing a blog post about my procrastination.
Not just because it's long (well, for a "tutorial", no one expects 1000 pages), but because I'm not sure I need to. On one hand, apart from hype and pretty bad arguments, it could be tangentially useful for my work. On the other hand, saying you have JavaEE experience at work could, well, exponentially increase your responsibilities without much pay difference.
I know a bit of JavaEE, and that's it. But most of what it offers I already used in other forms. Persistence API? Hibernate. Remote objects and clustering? Spring and Terracotta. JSP? GSP (Groovy Server Pages). Web Services? A servlet that returns a JSON object.
But then, none of my solutions "scale", that is other devs can understand what I'm doing, or be free to run my code on different implementations of the library APIs I use, or have any kind of large-scale commercial support. It's all fine to run some GSPs in Jetty running from a self-expanding JAR file, but then when "the customer" has to run it on their own on hundreds of machines, well, no it's not fine.
Look, I hate code generation. And creating layers of "data access objects" through remote "Enterprise Java Beans" is not fun. But I don't know of anything else that scales as well while being properly supported. You can brag about running a Hadoop cluster on a fiber channel network, but in the "enterprise" world the question is if some poor dev in India can tweak your code five years after you moved on to another job.
So they say that with annotations JavaEE 5 is now easier to use. I'll see. I guess I just convinced myself while writing this post.
Published on August 29, 2009 at 14:32 EDT
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