On 6/5/06, Duong BaTien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello Craig: Could you let us know if you are a part of the proposed Web Beans that combine Shale, Oracle ADF, and Seam? It may even more useful if you can roughly lay out the direction of your vision in this area.
I am indeed, in the sense that I worked with Gavin on preparing the JSR submission in the first place, and I am going to be Sun's representative on the Expert Group. My personal vision for this sort of thing is centrally based on the idea that a successful foundation framework should serve as an integration platform for lots of different specialized frameworks, even if those specialized frameworks might have individual implementations of the same functional area. Look at the success of Spring ... a criticial success factor is how the dependency injection framework, used as a foundation, embraces alternative approaches to the same problem areas, because one size does not fit all needs. I would get real nervous if we tried to build a single monolithic architecture that allowed only one "blessed" approach to each need. For example, you can use Shale, ADF Faces, and Seam today ... by themselves or in any of the possible combinations ... because they all are based on JSF. Yes, there are functionality overlaps ... and that's a good thing. Pick the right combination of technologies that meet the needs of your particular project. So, why standardize Web Beans, then? It's sort of like the early days of web frameworks, when everyone was solving their needs by building their own webapp frameworks. There is enough experience in the world today to raise the base level of functionality provided by the platform. The binding and state management capabilities contemplated in the JSRs will provide solutions to problems that people like me who provide frameworks :-) shouldn't necessarily *have* to build ourselves ... let alone applicaton developers. Of course, even if the Web Beans JSR[1] comes to fruition and is adopted, nothing forces you to use it, or all of it -- any more than using a JavaEE platform application server forces you to use EJBs if you don't want to. But adopting technologies that get standardized does make it more likely that you'll get competitive product offerings from multiple providers (along with tools support) more quickly than might otherwise occur. Thanks
BaTien DBGROUPS
Craig [1] http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=299
