The Pragmatic Craftsman :: Simplicity from complexity : by Stanley Kubasek ::

I am excited. For the first time, I can say that Java EE development can actually be fun and cutting edge. Jeremy Norris recently said, and I retweeted it, “If you’ve chosen Spring by default since 2005 for your EE needs, you owe it to yourself to take a real close look at JEE6.” I totally agree.

Just to give you some background. My exposure to Java EE has been limited. I have not really programmed in it. I did for 6 months or so, but it was in the J2EE 1.3 world and it was ugly/slow/overly complicated. I’ve tried to stay away from J2EE. Spring was a bit different. I’ve done Spring programming for a few years and generally have a good experience with it. But I don’t like too much XML configuration. I don’t like the fact you can easily get “tied” to the framework, which I don’t consider a best practice. Spring is a vast improvement over J2EE, but it’s not optimal either.

But now, Java EE 6 and Spring 3 enter a different ball game. I’m interested to see how it plays out. One thing I’m sure:  the newest Java EE will be a good Spring competitor. Will it win? We’ll see.

I’ve always wanted the Java EE platform to be easier. JEE 5 went in that direction, but not far enough. Java EE 6 takes a few more steps. And I believe that it has crossed the “innovative/fun/cutting edge” line while allowing you to do some powerful stuff. Of course, it remains to be seen, but that’s what I feel now.

Here are some of the reasons why I think so…

No XML configs. Gone are EJB descriptors. Gone are JSF navigation rules. You don’t need XML for dependency injection. All of this means that this is really a big step forward. In some cases you might still need an XML config, but I like how it’s “configuration by exception” — that is, you might need one if you want to setup something other than the default configuration.

JSF 2 is fun. If you’ve ever developed web apps in Java, you know that it’s not optimal. I don’t like it when I see Java code inside JSPs. Who uses JSPs any more, anyway? Working with Spring MVC/JSTL is limited. Not bad, but tedious. But with JSF 2 and Managed Beans, you get a really nice, simple, and powerful solution. All you really need is one Managed Bean and one XHTML file. Really easy to get started. And I find this model of development intuitive: your view is tightly connected with the data. You don’t have to marshall/unmarshall the request in your controller. It’s done for you. Nice and simple!

JPA 2 is easy to use and robust. Powerful as well. It’s an excellent solution as an ORM. Ability to use JPA as a stand alone solution is also great.

EJB 3.1 is easy. Yes, easy. Want proof? Add @Stateless to your Java class and you’re done. No more configuration is needed. Want more? Create a webapp, add a Java class, and add a @Stateless bean. Deploy it to an app server and you have an EJB application! Done! No, you don’t need to package it to an EAR file (I hated that). Really cool.

Glassfish v3 is solid. It fully supports Java EE 6. I believe it’s the best EE application server out there. Good job to the team! Plus, with a stack of Java EE 6, Glassfish v3, and Netbeans 6.8 (no, it’s not my IDE), you can have a simple JEE app running in 5 minutes or so.

Testability. Embeddable containers. EJB has one. JPA has one as well. It’s really simple to setup some powerful integration testing. This is some serious stuff. You can test your database logic fully with an embedded database. EJB container testing is easy as well! Built in Java EE 6. You can test your EJBs with JUnit!

There are many other nice features with this release. I don’t know them all. And again, these are just my observations. So far, I’ve only read Beginning Java EE 6 with Glassfish 3 and tried a few things. Nothing serious. I’m going to learn more. I’m going to create applications based on it. This is some really exciting stuff. I just hope corporations that are still in the J2EE world move into the Java EE 6 world soon. They have good reasons for doing so now.