On Tue, 2002-02-26 at 22:41, Rob Nagler wrote: > Chris Winters writes: > > Relegating a whole section of the development community -- many of whom > > are really smart and actually know what they're doing in the Real World > > -- with something like this seems needlessly inflammatory to me. > > I don't understand this statement in relation to this one: > > > That said, most of the time I think the pain that comes with EJB > > development is not worth the benefits you get. Of course, Sun and the > > J2EE lobby won't mention this... > > It seems you are saying: There are a lot of smart people doing EJBs, > but I think they are wasting their time. Is this a misreading on my > part?
Nah, just mushy language on my part. More specifically: there are a lot of people who see J2EE as a magic salve that will make all their applications a piece of cake to manage. There are also a lot of people who feel they must use J2EE (a sledgehammer) to solve their fairly routine application issues -- they see it as the answer to their every question. But there are many applications to which it is very well suited: so no, they're not wasting their time. > > People who use them for web-only > > applications of a standard size are making their lives needlessly > > complicated. (But this is also true of most database systems -- how many > > apps *really* need Oracle?) > > Depends on what you mean by "need". If you need row-level locking or > a standby database, it's Oracle or DB2 afaik. I think this kind of begs the question :-) Do most apps *need* these features? It's the same kind of attitude I mentioned above: Oracle is the answer to every question. Even if you just have 200 MB and no more than 50 max concurrent users doing normal browse/create/update operations, and normal backup operations will be just fine. (And IIRC, I believe that Sybase ASE, Sybase ASA, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL all have row-level locking or versions implementing the same concept.) > You can write it in whatever you like, because 1) Oracle is managing > the txns and 2) Apache is multilingual. Well, if you're just going to write to the database and bypass your application logic, then you can do this with any application server. Even J2EE -- just tell that object that it can't use the cache and must get refreshed every time from the database. The Apache point is an excellent one, but it also assumes that web apps are the main point of the application server. > If you are writing EJBs, they aren't defined in IDL so you can't talk > to them via CORBA. You can write and adapter, but you can write a > SOAP adapter. There are tools to scan Java files and generate IDLs from them (see http://openorb.exolab.org/rmioveriiop.html for an example). One thing to think about with J2EE: the fact that there's a specification means that the powerful notion of a portable transaction container isn't just for businesses who can easily drop $100K+. A specification means that anyone with the will, time and smarts can come along and implement it -- and make it open source. The fact that there are a number of vibrant projects doing just that -- JBoss, the Exolab group, Apache Jakarta modules, etc. -- is to me an amazing leveler. And my apologies if my initial email seemed a little harsh. It's a knee-jerk reaction to underestimating the work done in the Java community. Particularly when as Perl folks we get underestimated all the time -- we're used to being in those shoes. But I'm working on my breathing techniques :-) Chris -- Chris Winters ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.
