Java EE 5 Simply Too Complex, Analyst Says
1990s approach to programming makes platform no longer viable
November 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 2)
When Sun Microsystems trotted out Java Enterprise Edition 5 at JavaOne this past summer, the company heralded it as the simplest Java EE yet. With the addition of Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, annotations and more refined persistence support, Java EE 5 was supposed to speed development and testing. But at the time, Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst at the Burton Group and one of the contributors to the design of EJB 3.0, predicted that Java EE 5 was still too large and complex. Now, four months later, he’s more sure than ever that Java EE 5 stacks are headed for the junk heap.
Monson-Haefel was on the executive committee for J2EE 1.4 and he was a founder of the open-source application server project Geronimo. He said that the future of Java as a whole is not in question, but that the massive framework of Java EE 5 is still too much to handle.
“Java Standard Edition is rock-solid. It’s Java EE that’s no longer a viable platform,” said Monson-Haefel. He added that, while many developers use servlets, Java Database Connectivity and JavaServer Pages, these same developers are usually at the Java EE trough for these features alone. “The Java EE specification says you have to use all these [APIs]. In order to be certified, you have to create a project that uses all these pieces. To get all those things to play well together, you end up with a really complicated programming model. Java EE is based on a late-1990s approach to programming: It’s very API-centric.”
COMPLICATING MATTERS
Monson-Haefel said that, rather than simplifying things in Java EE 5, the JCP actually has complicated matters. While Sun touts simplicity as the most significant improvement to this version, Monson-Haefel said that these improvements actually increased the difficulty for developers.
“It seems simpler on the surface, but developers have to learn an entirely new API: the persistence API, which introduces a new programming model,” said Monson-Haefel. “It’s not a programming model that substantially simplifies the task. If they’d added a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop system for development, that would be a convincing simplicity argument. But looking at the tech itself, and speaking to people who are actually using EE, and using it myself, I came to the conclusions that this platform is not simpler—it’s just different.”
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