Hi Ian, This may or may not be helpful but I have started looking into porting an existing WO 5.2.3 app to Java EE 5. I havn't done any formal comparisons or analysis but here are some things that struck me early on:
EJB 3.0 Gone are the days or XML descriptors and three classes to just map one database table. POJO's + annotations make doing the ORM stuff really easy even without a modelling tool. Some things I liked were Java 5 enum mapping - in my WO apps I just custom classes for enum properties on EO's. It works ok but being able to model them directly is nicer. As the persistence engine can vary from app server to app server for EJB 3.0 you can still end up using propriatory extensions and also they can work differently with different DBs. I have some problems getting hibernate to work well with Frontbase. Also data validation via annotation is quite useful - a hibernate extension that can be used with other persistence managers. Generally though I like EJB 3 and it certainly does make that whole process easier. With dependency injection you can just annotate the data manager (like the EOEnterpriseContext) and the container will give it to you ready to go. Although I'm sure there are things you can do in ec's that you can't do in EJB 3. One thing is that all the configuration is done with annotations. I guess it's too early to tell if this will be better or worse in the long run than XML descriptors. Other things like message driven beans are useful for asynchronous processing and I found they made some things I was doing in WO for background processing easier. JSF The whole JSF thing is a bit odd. I think the tech is ok and does the job, what's odd are all the different implementations. I think it would be easy to end up in a situation where you want some components from one JSF implementation and other ones from a different implementation, which could get a bit annoying. Also the html output from JSF is not necessarily the best. I mention JSF here because I didn't want to use servlets directly or jsp. one of the issues with Java EE is that there are quite a few different toolkits for rendering the presentation layer. I think it all depends on what you are trying to do. I quite liked the EJB + JSF integration that JBoss Seam provides and I think it has some nice ideas but can take a little getting use to. Web Services Why oh why does Java make web services so complicated? A major fustration here is that Java EE 5 does make web services development easier but you need to be running in a fully Java EE 5 complient app server... now this start to get more interesting when you want to use a framework like Seam that works *best* on JBoss. I had a lot of isses getting a simple web service to work straight away on JBoss 4.0.5 and 5 beta 1. Glassfish it was really easy to do though. On the other hand doing with Ruby on Rails took about 10 mins of reading and 5 mins of coding. One of the key reasons I started looking at Java EE again was I was going to have to do more web service work and WO just doesn't seam to be developing much in that area. Summary Being able to use Java 5 and I guess now Java 6. WO had a big head start on the rest of the Java server market and indeed the whole web development market but as development has slowed over the years other applications servers and frameworks have start to catch up. I think Java EE 5 is definitely work looking into. It's not as slow and eye pokingly painful to develop with as it used to be. On the performance side of things perhaps just being able to deploy with Java 6 might be a significant enough boost. There are some interesting reports of Java 6 vs Java 5 for speed etc. Any way hope some of this helps. Cheers, John On 1/9/07, Ian Joyner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have searched around but can't find any papers on direct comparisons of WebObjects vs J2EE. Does anyone know of sources that address such questions as: Comparison of features Ease of development/deployment and the biggy: PERFORMANCE Also does anyone have any feelings about performance of WO 4.5.1 (Objective-C) vs 5.3.1 (Java)? Did 5.x increase the performance in any big way? Thanks Ian _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/wolists%40gmail.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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