Is Java land in a state of chaos? The answer will be an astounding "NO" if you ask the questions to any J2EE enthusiast like me. But the answer may be a thumping "YES" if you ask this to a .NET evangelist or an entry level Java developer or an IT manager who monitors community forums like TheServerSide.com. I spoke to a few IT managers and developers last week during my trip to LA and many of them seemed to be confused with the current state of affairs with Java and J2EE. If you follow news threads in the community forums like TheServerSide.com in past few months, you will not find much positive news besides shipping of J2SE 5.0. The news threads that galore are EJB bashing by lightweight zealots, ongoing debate over the persistence layer, merits and demerits of J2EE containers vs. lightweight containers, a lot of Java geeks jumping out of Sun/BEA over to Google, etc. After reading all these threads one may quickly jump into conclusion that the Java/J2EE community is in a state of chaos. The J2EE community seems to too much fragmented and disoriented these days and we have too many disagreements in whatever we do. The momentum behind Java and J2EE as a standard seems to be lost somewhere and none of us realizing that Microsoft is trying to capitalize.
To add fuel to fire, an analyst firm Burton group released a report a report title “J2EE: A standard in jeopardy”. Interestingly, this report was written by Richard Monson-Haefel who until recently was considered as a spokesman for J2EE. I have not the privilege to read the full report but what I understand Monson-Haefel notes J2EE standard is threatened by open source. This tempts me to ask this question “Has open source done more harm than good to J2EE?” May be. I always thought earlier open source tools and utilities supplied by open source communities make the J2EE platform vibrant and complete and drive commercial vendors to innovate to compete with free software and services. But I’ve started to believe that in the last one year open source has created too much confusion in the J2EE and much of this chaos are attributed to open source Java software. We have too many open source frameworks and this creates a lot of confusion among the developers. In a recent thread of discussion Don Box of Microsoft commented in his blog site that it seems to him that Java/J2EE is a state of chaos. There are several open source Java tools, frameworks and utilities that are really useful and we use everyday such as Ant, Struts, etc. However the open source movement has gone to its extreme and it looks like every other person wants to start his open source project. Getting a choice is better but too many choices create confusion. One of my coworker recently pointed me to this link that shows all Java open source frameworks and utilities. This looks scary to even to seasoned Java developer! Let us consider a scenario that you hate EJB and want to use a lightweight container with a persistence layer, JMS services and want scheduling capabilities then you use Springs, Hibernate, Quartz, OpenJMS, etc. Not to discount the learning curve with each of this software, think about the plumbing work that you have to developer if you want to use some of these. And whom do you call if you run into any issues when you are doing the integration yourself. Most of these plumbing are done my many application servers and they support the whole platform. For example, you can use any commercial J2EE application servers like OracleAS that comes with all these facilities without having to deal with the support nightmare. Thus it make sense to use a commercial application servers from a leading vendors like Oracle, IBM, or BEA if you think J2EE is important for your IT investment. If you think J2EE is not critical you can choose an open source frameworks like Springs or jump over to.Net.
Despite the fact open source has poised to be a threat for survival of J2EE, the good news is that all major vendors Oracle, IBM and BEA are still behind J2EE. Open source groups like JBoss has joined the JCP and actively participating in the standardization process. The J2EE 5.0 specification is trying to simplify development of applications. Sun made a right decision to merge the efforts for persistence into one specification and this effort was broadly welcome not only by EJB and JDO vendors but also by the user community. We have to remember For J2EE to survive, the community and vendors needs to be united and put their support behind the standard. Otherwise J2EE will be a thing of past like COBOL?
4:31:14 AM 
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