I think they are used incorrectly

Post #123,575 by tuberculosis 10/31/03 1:00:23 PM 8/21/07 5:57:30 AM Reply	I think they are used incorrectly I'm not a big fan of J2EE but the bit that I think is really silly is EJB. The rest of J2EE (servlets, jdbc, and the other services) aren't totally sucky (although jsp and the other java templating mechanisms that keep coming out are amazingly lame and clumsy to use). Of the web development environments I've used, I find Seaside amazing (the continuation based state management and html rendering api is very easy to use and thus productive), WebObjects very good (the quality is coming back with some new blood on the team), and Servlets only marginally better than CGI (the core advantage being some automatic session tracking and memory residency). While I am completely in favor of the logical business tier - I don't see any good reason to move it to another process space like EJB typically does. Nor do I find the constraints that EJB puts on my code to be acceptable. Whats left is nothing like objects. The one exception would be message driven beans - basically a reasonable way to have another process sit at the other end of a queue and chew away on async tasks. I'm forming more and more concrete opinions on this recently as I've begun working on a system in exchange for equity in a local startup. We acquired the system for pennies from another company that folded. It started out on WebLogic, but as they got into it they first pitched WL's jdbc connection pooling and wrote their own because of an inability to cache prepared sql statements. They also pitched JSP as being too simplistic and wrote their own html template processor. The object to database mapping was written by hand (ie - class methods provide meta info to their custom mapping code). Bottom line is that WL has been reduced to running servlets. Since we're a startup with no funding (everybody has a second job except me), I'm probably going to end up moving the thing to Tomcat or Jetty or something free like that. I think the whole J2EE app server market is overblown and agree that its mostly FUD and snake oil for sale there. In Java, you can't escape the creepy feeling. --James Gosling Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 05:57:30 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #124,399 by gdaustin 11/5/03 10:22:45 PM Reply	Agree on most points.... >>I'm forming more and more concrete opinions on this recently as I've begun >>working on a system in exchange for equity in a local startup. We acquired >>the system for pennies from another company that folded. It started out on >>WebLogic, but as they got into it they first pitched WL's jdbc connection >>pooling and wrote their own because of an inability to cache prepared sql >>statements. When we switched to prepared SQL statements on DB2, our performance TRIPLED. So, I think this is HUGE. Prepared SQL statements are exactly how DB2 and Oracle win a lot of performance bakeoffs. The cached statements avoid the statement parser and optimizer, and that makes all the difference in world. >>They also pitched JSP as being too simplistic and wrote their own html >>template processor. The object to database mapping was written by hand (ie - >>class methods provide meta info to their custom mapping code). Bottom line >>is that WL has been reduced to running servlets. Since we're a startup with >>no funding (everybody has a second job except me), I'm probably going to end >>up moving the thing to Tomcat or Jetty or something free like that. Here's another thing I agree on. We used servlets first, then JSP, when the CEO didn't like the "look and feel" of the servlet code, and he wanted the creative arts department involved. But, it is clumsy to embed the Java into the HTML, especially when you want "really dynamic" OO pages. I'm really surprised that someone hasn't built a Smalltalk-like OO web tool that would build "dynamic web pages", using objects to assemble the screen dynamically with each request. I also agree that the highest performance is to keep as much as possible on a single machine, mainly because a in-system call overhead is usually about less than 1 millisecond on newer systems, and between-system overhead is at least 10-15 milliseconds, even on fast networks, similar machnes, with no marshalling. For each method call, it's at least a factor of 10 slower, and probably explains Maggie's 8 second transations on an EJB system. Glen Austin
Post #124,467 by tuberculosis 11/6/03 11:16:40 AM 8/21/07 6:19:40 AM Reply	RE: OO Web Tool I'm really surprised that someone hasn't built a Smalltalk-like OO web tool that would build "dynamic web pages", using objects to assemble the screen dynamically with each request. They have. Its called WebObjects. Use it once and most of the rest of the web app tool builders look like pikers. You can now use WO as part of your J2EE stack and deploy into existing app servers. So you can just use the presentation layer, or the OO/RDBMS mapping (which does in fact precalculate and prepare most statements it uses). Its only $700 but the tools only run (well) on Macs. Or you can switch to Smalltalk or Ruby and use Seaside which associates single argument blocks with form elements to let you store the results coming in anyway you like. Both of these make the conventional templating systems look like freshman level projects. "I believe that many of the systems we build today in Java would be better built in Smalltalk and Gemstone." -- Martin Fowler, JAOO 2003 Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:19:40 AM EDT Expand All History

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