JEE: Dead In 5 Years?

Well, it seems Richard Monson-Haefel* thinks just that.

In an article published at SearchWebServices.com, both Richard and Zapthink's Jason Bloomberg opined that the Java Enterprise Edition will go the way of the dodo within five years. It is important to note that they talked about the JEE platform and not Java itself.

The two main points they make are:

• JEE is complex
• JEE is not a good fit for SOA.

Let's examine both these claims.

First JEE is complex. Well of course it is. JEE helps solve complex problems. Enterprise systems (and pardon me for the cliche) pose all sorts of complex problem related to security, managability, data interaction, scalability, availability . It should be noted that not all enterprise applications are created equal. In fact I believe many so called "enterprise applications" don't need to solve all the aforementioned requirements--and those applications can probably be better served with simpler solutions (picocontainers, Ruby On Rails and few other choices comes to mind). Nevertheless there are those systems that do need to solve the more complex problems and they can benefit from a fully featured application server offered by JEE (esp. now, with EJB 3.0 which seems to be taking the right direction).

The other point regarding SOA seems to me completly bogus. The SOA style has to do with how services interact, the separation of the service edge from the service business, reliance on policy, granularity of components, and so on. It is true that "SOA and Web services diminished the importance of what you have running on the backend" but this is only true for what the world external to the service see. You still have to go an implement that damn service somehow and EJBs is a fine, vialble option to do that (the service implementation).

While I truly hope that in five years JEE will not look the same as it does today. All platforms should evolve. However, I certainly don't think we will see it disappearing or diminishing in importance to the level CORBA did.

PS: You may also want to look at the lively discussion @ TheServerSide.com that ensued after the article was published.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 08:31 AM  Permalink