Please forgive my frustrated tone, but I've been working with EJB (CMP beans with session facades) using Sun's J2SDKEE. I find the development cycle extremely tiring and slow. I write bean code. I go to their deploytool to deploy it. I run the thing. Find problems and come back to my development environment.
I understand some IDEs will make this cycle easier. Still, I've been used to developing and testing code quickly in an iterative cycle. After many of these iterations, I deploy to user environment--many code/compile/test-runs, very few deployments. One of the big advantages of a quasi-intrepretive language like Java is precisely that the repetitive code/compile/test-run cycle is quick. EJB changed all this. They stuck a rather long, tedious, and often painful deployment phase right between compile and test-run, often breaking the development cycle with 10 to 20 minute breaks. Debugging such a deployed app is a nightmare. Because EJB (especially CMP) generate so many classes and because so many of these are system generated stuff, I have very little idea what's going on or what I have done wrong. Also, so much information that are important to developers are hidden away from them in multi-level jars/ears/wars, etc. (and these things are humongous). And, why so many classes? When running, I see over 4 classes generated for each EJB bean. This is excess and debugging nightmare! With Java, the trickiest configuration parameter was CLASSPATH. With EJB, I have to know and worry about so many of these configurations, I feel like I need a dictionary of them. What's going on? It's almost as though EJB put Java back to the level of C++ and C++ templates. I don't know about others, but I generalize dislike and dispise the condescending attitude of any system that tells developers: "Don't worry. We'll take care of you by generating lots of stuff under the covers. Why would you care about long breaks in the development cycle? Go take a coffee break." Developers are an impatient and controlling bunch. Java has been good because it gives speed of development and gives enough control for developers. In my opinion, EJB is going backwards (the wrong direction). Is there an effort to address these? Or, is it that to be an EJB developer, you have to take all this willingly and gladly? _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff EJB-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
