Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Java EE 5:
I'm really big into Java. I know a ton of people boo Java because they think it is slow or some other reason. I'm here to tell you that Java is very prevalent and very useful. Many websites are powered by Java EE and with good reason.

Over the years Sun and the Java Community have added really exciting technologies to the Java Platform. Some have seen their day come and go, but many have really useful corner cases. However, the best platform I've seen in some time is the Java EE 5 platform.

Java EE is one of the few multi-tier application platforms still in town. The really hot craze right now is your good old LAMP stack or RoR. However, these approaches return to the days of monolithic hosting of network applications. This approach is nice for small to medium deployments, but without some serious modifications, do not scale well in large deployments. This is one of the reasons why LAMP has taken off so much, the stack is completely open source, so modifications can be done on the code easily to adjust to large deployments.

Multi-tiered software was made to scale. It has lost favor since it takes a lot of resources to get started at first (due mostly from configuring and creating the first bits of each layer.) Java and .NET have taken steps to address this large problem, how do we make multi-tiered APIs but still make it easy for small deployments?

Java EE 5 and the future EE 6 bring a lot to the table to make it easy to stop boiler plating things and start deploying services to meet your customers demands. I know it sound a lot like a big commercial.

Multi-tier software has gotten a bad rap from things like DCOM and CORBA. But if you sit down and try Java EE 5, I'm sure you'll see that multi-tier has come a long way from where it was.

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