My Java Experience

<i>They came out of sheer self defense out of the amount of toil &#38; trouble that you have to go through using what the bare bones Java EE gave you.</i><p>This describes an awful lot of enterprise Java. My most recent discovery was RestEasy, which a) took a week to get working and b) was at least ten times less painful than our previous web services implementation, to the point where I am tempted to delete the wiki, nuke the repository, and cover up any evidence of ever using SOAP or XML-RPC for fear that an incautious code archeologist in the future might open the jar and release the horror upon the world again.

I think this article would be better titled "My J2EE Experience".<p>I've been working with Java professionally for 5.5 years in enterprise environments and I've never used EJB, nor do I know anyone who has.<p>The sad thing about marketing-type speak that ends up calling J2EE "a platform" is that it becomes very easy to misinterpret the nastiness of these APIs - that's what EE really is, just a set of APIs - as somehow reflecting on the state of the entire ecosystem/community.

I've been doing mostly Java for over a decade. For me, the session bean is the most useful part of the somewhat artificial amalgam that is JEE/J2EE/whatever. Need declarative XA transaction management? "Required" is your friend. Want to remote to a service but also use it locally? Yup. Need to control the number of concurrent invocations of a service? Just configure your thread pools.<p>Don't need any of that stuff? Then, you probably don't need J2EE. I've never used a stateful session bean on a project and haven't heard too many good use cases to justify them. Pre-3.0 EJBs were a disaster, and everybody just used Hibernate. And EJB3 is basically Hibernate anyway.<p>For lighter-weight Java, the Spring Framework along with annotations takes away a lot of the misery the author discusses.

Use Groovy/Grails if you must develop a Web app on the JVM or reuse existing Java code.<p>J2EE was a disaster (I have 6+ years experience with it). So much wasted talent and time.