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Oracle and the fall of Java EE

191 pointsby SanderMakalmost 9 years ago

18 comments

StevePerkinsalmost 9 years ago
Amen. Be it Hacker News, or the &#x2F;r&#x2F;java subreddit, or wherever, it feels like the bulk of Java chatter revolves around...<p>1. Security vulnerabilities<p>2. The Ask.com toolbar<p>3. Oracle abandoning Java EE<p>... which is extremely frustrating because...<p>1. Virtually all of the &quot;security vulnerabilities&quot; deal with the browser plugin for using applets, which hasn&#x27;t been widely used in 15 years<p>2. The toolbar malware, while stupid beyond measure, only applies to the consumer Java installer, which nobody installs anymore due to item #1 above.<p>3. Java EE is legacy tech. While deeply entrenched, most of the work out there for it today consists of maintenance or migration to more service-friendly approaches like Spring or Dropwizard.<p>Java is certainly not perfect. It&#x27;s also long in the tooth, and is associated with &quot;the enterprise&quot;, and so it&#x27;s not seen as &quot;sexy&quot; by young developers. But for business software, large-scale data processing, and web&#x2F;REST backends, I&#x27;ve yet to find anything on the horizon that seriously competes with it.<p>Every year I get bored and go exploring a new alternative language in side projects. Every year I come back, more appreciative of what I have. Python&#x2F;Ruby&#x2F;Node have their beginner-friendly charms, but are limited by the lack of type checking and&#x2F;or chaotic ecosystems. Golang seems really promising, but has a long way to go. C# seems like the most credible challenger for business systems, but the .NET Core ecosystem is probably still years away from being where Java was in 2005.<p>I don&#x27;t mind discussing Java&#x27;s shortcomings. But I&#x27;m tired of hearing about <i>irrelevant</i> shortcomings such as applets and Java EE. Because that&#x27;s just a way to keep a &quot;language war&quot; going without having to point at a serious alternative.
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sandGorgonalmost 9 years ago
Is it fashionable to bash java ?<p>What about <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;graalvm&#x2F;truffle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;graalvm&#x2F;truffle</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;allr&#x2F;fastr&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;allr&#x2F;fastr&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Home</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OUo3BFMwQFo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OUo3BFMwQFo</a> ? There is serious innovation happening in java land (through Oracle - without talking about Clojure, etc.)<p>Java EE exists because of the need to support large legacy, enterprise customers.<p>For those who are starting out in Java web frameworks, people usually use Spring or Spring Bootstrap (and sometimes the newer Java 8 only <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sparkjava.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sparkjava.com&#x2F;</a>).
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ufmacealmost 9 years ago
I do mostly C#, and don&#x27;t know very much about the Java ecosystem, and I could barely understand anything in that article due to all of the Java jargon. Can anybody summarize what the point is for somebody who hasn&#x27;t spent their career knee-deep in the Java ecosystem?
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geodelalmost 9 years ago
Java EE is described by some as old, heavy, over engineered technology as opposed to Java SE + simple servlet containers with some Spring or other &#x27;lightweight&#x27; frameworks.<p>However in my opinion there is something about Java&#x2F;Java designers at Sun&#x2F;Oracle&#x2F;IBM that lead to over designed APIs and code. Looking at just Java servlet api, it is described in most elaborate manner. It is not about supporting Http Listeners endpoints + some additional features but about any kind of servlets possible for past and future protocols. It is awkward and lacking features for practical Web based applications but still has 74 class just for specifying servlets and no implementation.<p>So arguments about Java SE vs Java EE vs Spring vs Other hot Java framework seems facile to me. Java it self has set the tone to describe things in most elaborate manner, not most succinct manner and anything on top of that more or less follow that tradition.
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_Codemonkeyismalmost 9 years ago
I may wrong you, but I won&#x27;t click on a link to &quot;techsticles&quot;
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itayskalmost 9 years ago
Java always had an awesome open source community around it that produced frameworks, libraries and tools that inspired many other communities. but at it&#x27;s core, Oracle was and still is the exact opposite of open (JVM, J2EE as examples). That makes me wander why Java was always considered the icon of open source.
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huhertoalmost 9 years ago
I dislike Oracle as a company. I whish Sun had been acquired by Google instead.<p>But the Java ecosystem is awesome. The language is great, the JVM is great. As long as you know what you are doing.
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brown9-2almost 9 years ago
Realistically, Java EE &quot;fell&quot; a long time ago, once people realized you could use Spring or Guice or other frameworks to help organize your code without relying on terribly designed APIs from Sun&#x2F;Oracle for simple things like &quot;I want to handle a http request&quot;.
mianosalmost 9 years ago
Sure, technology changes. I this case it is positive, moving away from monolithic bags of tricks to lighter services. That is all good for Java. But, we will be looking to moving away because Oracle can no longer be trusted.
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elgabogringoalmost 9 years ago
Everybody hates Oracle, but people still give them so much money! One has to wonder when it will end now that there are alternatives.
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markokrajncalmost 9 years ago
Java EE is a set of mostly bad libs for Java SE. Unfortunately the upper management has seen it as a &quot;better Java SE&quot;...
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niftichalmost 9 years ago
The author&#x27;s recommendations are:<p>&gt; 1. Drop the profiles. They are useless and pointless waste of time.<p>This is true, but profiles exist mostly for the benefit of vendors, not developers. Developers only care about modularity, see #2.<p>&gt; 2. Make Java EE a conglomeration of technologies that are known to work together (i.e. JPA, JTA, JMS), but don&#x27;t force their full installation. Let the use pick and choose what they want. Just be sure that they work together in pieces or in totality.<p>You can do this today, if you use good implementations for those APIs (JMS, JPA)<p>&gt; 3. Make it modular. Start with zero and let people add what they want to use.<p>Same as #2, plus Jigsaw.<p>&gt; 4. Get rid of the tree class loader. You need it matrix based. OSGi is fine. Jigsaw is fine. But it needs to have classes that can be loaded and unloaded without an impact on the container. &gt; 5. The container itself should be a thin shell with remote capabilities (again OSGi&#x2F;Karaf looks really good here)<p>The OSGi spec gets a bad rep for complexity, but it actually solves a hard problem. Karaf&#x27;s default UI, on the other hand, is terrible.<p>&gt; 6. Make it cloud friendly. Microservices needs to be core functionality, lightweight, and run in the cloud.<p>Uhh, it&#x27;s pretty cloud friendly now. Not sure what the author wants here.<p>Ultimately the author says, if you&#x27;re invested in the Java EE ecosystem, you can&#x27;t rely on Oracle to move it forward, but you shouldn&#x27;t let their inaction lead to your inaction. However, due to IP reasons and a perceived past overengineering, the community has nearly given up on Java EE and focuses on Java SE instead. This means that they&#x27;ve adopted points #1, #2, #3 and #6, and are actually moving the ecosystem forward, just piecewise and no longer under the &#x27;Java EE&#x27; name.
kolalmost 9 years ago
The wait is over, here is Oracle&#x27;s official response to the rumors: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;not-dead-yet-oracle-promises-big-plans-for-java-ee&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;not-de...</a>
johan_larsonalmost 9 years ago
What are the current best bets for writing web apps in Java? Play! is convenient, but how does it compare to Spring Boot?
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altendoalmost 9 years ago
I understand the viewpoint put forth here, but I think the big issue is making sure Java EE continues even as Oracle decides it&#x27;s no longer worth the investment. I don&#x27;t know how easily a group or organization (like Apache) can take charge of it given trademarks, patents, and the like.
dborehamalmost 9 years ago
I think that as with many things, you need to follow the money:<p>Someone has to pay for the talented and expensive people needed to develop, maintain and extend a language&#x2F;ecosystem (&quot;community&quot; does not == free of cost).<p>It isn&#x27;t obvious to me what the underlying motivation would be to drive the investment required. For Swift&#x2F;C#&#x2F;Golang it seems to be roughly &quot;Platform Entrenchment&quot; or perhaps &quot;if not this then we&#x27;re owned by $otherbigco&quot;. Oracle doesn&#x27;t really have a platform to entrench these days.
patrick_vbnalmost 9 years ago
Wildfly Swarm (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wildfly-swarm.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wildfly-swarm.io&#x2F;</a>) seems like the exact adaptation the author is looking for. &quot;Swarm offers an innovative approach to packaging and running JavaEE applications by packaging them with just enough of the server runtime to &quot;java -jar&quot; your application.&quot;
einrealistalmost 9 years ago
Nice post! I have the same opinion.<p>I guess, most people who make a scene about Oracle&#x27;s stance think that Java EE is the same as the JCP. The JCP will go on and JSRs that are part of EE will continue to evolve. Its just a question of which JSRs still have value in a world of fast changing cloud &#x2F; compute infrastructures.