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A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

adam-bien.com

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Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#21

Post by mikehaggard »

cies wrote: post #14

Is this article telling the story of someone who's been on the JEE for 12 years, loves it, and would certainly choose it again. While I'm happy for him, I dont think it makes a good case JEE as a "startup's secret weapon" (SSW). By hypothetical comparison, if someone used 6 major tool chains for the last $DOUBLE_DIGIT_NUMBER years, and by comparison says one particular tool chain is an SSW, then I'm much more incline…

I agree with what you say. Certainly would have had a bit more value if the article had elaborated on whether they used anything else. I feel the interviewer should have asked about that. Even a "no, we didn't" would have been valuable. Now we know nothing.

That said, it DOES mean that they have been happy with Java EE and have been so happy that they choose it again for their latest startup.

Contrast this with a typical startup where engineers always seem to hate whatever they used before and are like children in a candy shop for having the opportunity to use whatever we think is cool here.

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#22

Post by mikehaggard »

threeseed wrote: post #6
eranation wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not extraordinary if you're an enterprise shop. What's not cool and old school for startups is probably the widest used web / services framework in the enterprise world, vying only with Spring and ASP.net There are probably more java EE jobs out there than ruby ones. (It doesn't say anything really, except the fact that some places don't laugh at you if you suggest Java EE, some places would laugh at you if you sugge…

Sure it's not extraordinary to still see them used. But suggested for a new project ? I've spent at least 15 years in enterprise companies and most new projects I've seen have been Scala/Clojure/Java 8 style in microservices form. Less so the monolithic WAR style apps. Not dismissing the choice at all. Would just like to hear more about why they are bucking the popular trend.

>But suggested for a new project ?

I'm seeing this a lot. If you browse the site the article's on you'll find some more examples.

The moral of the story is that "we" all think Java EE is very enterprisey and that it's anti the popular trend (which is AngularJS, Node.js, or were those popular yesterday?), and meanwhile a couple of startups are being very productive and able to start quickly with modern Java EE because "nobody" has realy noticed that Java EE slimmed down so much and got so much more productive.

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#23

Post by smoyer »

We're (re)developing almost all our infrastructure in modern Java EE (as layers of microservices). We're seeing less than 2mS response time for most services and can afford to stack quite a few to build our customer facing applications.

Ignoring the business logic, a RESTful API can be built to run on a Java EE application server in about 10 lines of code. And it will run on any Java EE 6-7 compliant server implementation (as a single JAX-RS application ... you'll need Java EE 7 for multiple JAX-RS applications per context).

EDIT:

I also should have pointed out that the "XML Hell" that was required to configure applications and almost every managed object in J2EE <= 4 has been eliminated. When the default behavior isn't quite what you want, meta-programming can be accomplished with an annotation in the code. The few remaining XML files can often be left empty - they're simply markers that activate features of the server (CDI bean scanning, Java Server Faces, etc).

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#24

Post by hibikir »

john-waterwood wrote: post #16
threeseed wrote: post #2

There is no doubt this combination would be extremely high performant e.g. Wildfly was always in the top handful on Techempower benchmarks. But using JSF and EJB is a pretty extraordinary combination to be using these days. You would honestly be laughed out of every Java development team for even considering it. Would definitely like to see why something like Dropwizard, Vert.x or even Play 1 wasn't considered.

JSF and EJB are the reason why Java EE is lately considered the "secret weapon". The fact is that both invoke memories of old times where they were very heavyweight and problematic technologies. EJB was a total disaster, where you needed to implement 3 interfaces and inherit from a framework provided base class, compile your code with a special "enhancing" tool and run yet another tool to generate something called st…

The fact that people that have used Java do not realize that EJB3 is pretty good, when it's pretty old! I switched to EJB3 in 2006, and I really couldn't see why people would choose Spring anything instead. The switch to Soap, and then to Rest, was changing a couple of annotations. Not bad for a 9 year old framework.

Now, my biggest problem with the stack, and the reason I do not use it anymore, is Java itself. A switch to Scala makes a lot of the Java boilerplate go away, and even Java 8 doesn't get close. Now, I find all the major Scala web libraries to be lacking, in one form or another. Play's second compilation feels clumsy. Spray's freedom of routing leads to very ugly code: Just look at their own large examples. So what I am currently doing is using a homebrew routing on top of Spray, which also gives me some documentation for free: Pretty useful when you have hundreds of services in hundreds of servers.

It's a pity that Java itself moves so slowly, and is so reluctant from adding key features, like pattern matching, because the rest of the tooling is pretty good.

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#25

Post by dschiptsov »

mkawia wrote: post #20
dschiptsov wrote: post #17

Please, Java EE here is an offence to our intelligence. There are infoq and other yellow paid content sites for it. Please.

What's wrong if that platform is improving . There are so many really good java libraries to play with . I for instance wanted to build a webapp with the StanfordNLP .

Oh, come on, the creator of this site has a whole essay about languages (or platforms) which has been made to solve actual problems faced by its creators or to solve other people's problems (to be sold to greater fools). There is no better example of second approach than J2EE.

To Google J2EE sucks is not that difficult. My favourite quote from Bell Labs folks - "whole encyclopedia could be written about what is wrong with J2EE". Rebranding doesn't matter - it is the same crappy mess of piles of unnecessary layes of ugly, redundant abstractions.

Don't be hypocrites. It sucks.

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#26

Post by puppetmaster3 »

I hate to tell you all since none will thank me, but the horse has left the barn - we now have 'thick client' where the app is client side in .js.

Also consider APIs/Baas: Backendless.com, Kinvery, App42, etc. http://baas.apievangelist.com. DIY REST is purely optional, for companies w/ poor CTO/CFO. PHP, JSP, ASP, Rails, Django is in same boat, server side rendering of UI is past prime, we now need stunning UI, ex: datatables.net, Admin LTE, etc.

Framework today is UI Kit, BootStrap, Foundation, etc. That is a framework. Alternative to that is PhoneGap, Swift - and for Java, there is hope, in Android.

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#27

Post by cies »

mikehaggard wrote: post #21
cies wrote: post #14

Is this article telling the story of someone who's been on the JEE for 12 years, loves it, and would certainly choose it again. While I'm happy for him, I dont think it makes a good case JEE as a "startup's secret weapon" (SSW). By hypothetical comparison, if someone used 6 major tool chains for the last $DOUBLE_DIGIT_NUMBER years, and by comparison says one particular tool chain is an SSW, then I'm much more incline…

I agree with what you say. Certainly would have had a bit more value if the article had elaborated on whether they used anything else. I feel the interviewer should have asked about that. Even a "no, we didn't" would have been valuable. Now we know nothing. That said, it DOES mean that they have been happy with Java EE and have been so happy that they choose it again for their latest startup. Contrast this with a typ…

> That said, it DOES mean that they have been happy with Java EE

Sure. I'm also happy for them, and I acknowledge JEE's massive installed-base and performance.

Just the "startup secret weapon" claim/title I thought was unfounded.

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#28

Post by john-waterwood »

hibikir wrote: post #24
john-waterwood wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSF and EJB are the reason why Java EE is lately considered the "secret weapon". The fact is that both invoke memories of old times where they were very heavyweight and problematic technologies. EJB was a total disaster, where you needed to implement 3 interfaces and inherit from a framework provided base class, compile your code with a special "enhancing" tool and run yet another tool to generate something called st…

The fact that people that have used Java do not realize that EJB3 is pretty good, when it's pretty old! I switched to EJB3 in 2006, and I really couldn't see why people would choose Spring anything instead. The switch to Soap, and then to Rest, was changing a couple of annotations. Not bad for a 9 year old framework. Now, my biggest problem with the stack, and the reason I do not use it anymore, is Java itself. A swi…

Yeah, EJB 3 is itself really not that new, but it took some time for implementations to come out. JBoss AS 5 took ages and EAP even longer. Then people had to upgrade from their older versions and then had to discover how much the new APIs had improved.

I don't have hard numbers, but judging from popular comments online I'm carefully guessing that it wasn't until ~2011 until people really started to see how simple EJB had become.

The old stigma still clings to it, much undeserved.

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#29

Post by manishsharan »

JSF ? Oh those gullible youngsters !

JSF is the slowest way to do web development for rich client UI: starting stopping J2EE servers is time consuming. HTML templating is difficult; you can't see what you screen looks like until you serve the page from your J2EE server .Also JSF is an unnecessary abstraction over HTML : it is much easier to maintain state on client itself using any of Javascript libraries like React or Backbone or others. You are much better off using REST servlets or REST Spring MVC with your javascript. JSF impedes the growth of features or functionality on a page: as you add more widgets to you page like JQuery plugins , you will be suprised by the amount of backend code you will have to write. Ultimately ,you will eventually resort to hacks and you page state and you JSF state for the page will deverge. Sadly you wont discover this mess until you are waist deep in this pile of muck.

JPA is pretty awesome ; however I have learnt over the years that you need to fine tune your queries using explainplan rather that relying on generated queries; define the views on the db itself and load them with JPA; this way the others frameworks or related application ,like a ASP application or a python web application or reportng application, can also leverage the same data and view.

Re: A Java EE Startup: Filtering information with zeef.com

#30

Post by [deleted] »

mkawia wrote: post #20
dschiptsov wrote: post #17

Please, Java EE here is an offence to our intelligence. There are infoq and other yellow paid content sites for it. Please.

What's wrong if that platform is improving . There are so many really good java libraries to play with . I for instance wanted to build a webapp with the StanfordNLP .

[deleted]
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