Listen to the EJB's go Pop:
Mike Clark was just muttering about EJBs and how they can lead you over the brink of complexity. And he asks: "Where did we go wrong?"
The easy (and flip) answer: EJBs went wrong by following technology built by people following the needs of the database companies and a few Fortune 500 companies that had narrow problems.
The hard (and maybe closer to the truth) answer: It's hard to tell really. The easy answer assumes that the approach taken was wrong. Quite the contrary, it was probably a decent tech for the problem space that it focused on. But the hype machine grabbed onto it and pretty soon it was floor topping (and desert wax). And once out of its natural environment, it grew talons and started breathing really cool looking, but inherently destructive fire.
Mike Cannon-Brookes stats in his blog that, "probably only 20% of enterprise Java projects require EJBs, whereas 80% use them." I agree with him, but even more so. I'd say only 10% of enterprise applications (probably counting for at least double or treble that in monetary worth) have a use for EJBs. Those 10% really need them, but in the other problem spaces, they are so the wrong choice.
Most telling to me: My friends who still work in the J2EE group at Sun that are charged with telling people how to write enterprise applications are now muttering about how there's a sudden demphasis on EJB's. Everyone is talking about other solutions now. Servlets (and tech built on top of them) and JDBC. Hell of a combo. Hey, I think I said that about 5 years ago while wandering the halls of CUP02. Course, not many people were listening back then. But a few were...
Source:
As you would expect, Duncan has plenty of insider knowledge on this.. It's too bad that technology can be so pimped by hype that it loses its value to developers..
9:36:11 AM 
