Weiqi Gao's Observations - javaee tag

You Become What You Disrupt

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:16:00 GMT

SpringSource Launches New Application Server without Java EE.

It looks like the Spring guys want to get into the proprietary Java App Server business, exactly what they tried so hard to discredit a mere four years ago.

EJB 3.0 At The JUG

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 15:37:21 GMT

Yesterday's EJB 3.0 talk at the St. Louis Java Users Group is another one of the more livelier presentations, with a lot of audience interactions.

Raj Patel from Harpoon Technologies began the talk with "I've done a lot of Hibernate work, but I've never done any EJB 2.1s. Those who did probably know how painful it was. EJB 3.0 is going to change that."

Having not read the EJB 3.0 specs myself (I'm waiting for the final version), I liked what I heard. I have seen earlier EJB 3.0 introductions on Java.net and elsewhere, but none of them registered. Again the open Eclipse project with live code helped.

The overwhelming impression I got from yesterday:

EJB 3.0 is very close to Hibernate
EJB 3.0 annotations are orders of magnitudes simpler than EJB 2.1 deployment descriptors
The EJB 2.1 concepts (stateless session beans, stateful session beans, entity beans, message driven beans, activation, passivation, declarative transaction management, declarative security management) all carry over to EJB 3.0. It's the syntax that is simplified
EJB 3.0 does dependency injection with annotations
EJB 3.0 does bean level method invocation interception (AOP) with annotations
EJBQL is similar to HQL (Hibernate query language)

Other observations:

Hibernate will evolve and be a superset of of EJB 3.0 [Update: See Eric Burke's correction]
EJB 3.0 offers some features that shadow the Spring Framework, but not enough to replace it
The embeddable JBoss EJB 3.0 container is cool
Raj says JDO is dead, JDO vendors are going EJB 3.0 (Solarmetric is bought by BEA.)

I guess a more pressing question is this: "Should I adopt EJB 3.0?"

And I think the answer is "It depends." If you've been following the open source developments pretty closely and are using Spring and Hibernate, there is no need to hurry. If you've stuck with the party line and are still doing EJB 2.1 or even 2.0, EJB 3.0 will look very attractive.

Geronimo---Here Comes The Cute Logo

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 12:43:06 GMT

I haven't followed the development of Geronimo, the Apache licensed, J2EE certified application server since I first reported on its formation 805 days ago.

It's been a little more than two years now. A check of the website indicates that they just made a "1.0-M5" release 14 days ago, passed the J2EE TCK 1.4.1a compatibility tests 111 days ago, and a free book is available if you read Spanish.

And today, I read from TheServerSide.com that they have just chosen their official logo.

According to my cute logo theory, this is more significant an event than most of the other technical milestones, for nothing attracts a crowd like a cute logo.