J2EE and Open Source Innovation

This session was presented by Keith Pitty who has many years experience with Java, and the enterprise J2EE and EJB technologies and evolution. This was a very useful session for me personally as I'm only relatively new to Java and was keen to find out more about some of the templating/MVC toolsets and how they relate to one another and J2EE.

Keith was involved in a project in 2001 which was initiated by Gavin King to come up with a framework that took all the pain of the original EJB, this project would eventually become Hibernate. The idea (it seems) was to abstract away all the complexities of managing object-relational persistance details and let the developer focus on Java objects themselves and forget about relational storage or back-end and SQL/JDBC details (tho it is possible to build manual/custom SQL queries). Gavin King later headed off to be involved with development of EJB3.

Keith then talked about Spring which is another more recent abstraction framework from Rod Johnson (another Aussie), he realised that EJBs are overkill for most projects which are predominatly JSPs talking to local classes with no need for the remote invocation features of J2EE. Spring has gained traction and challenged Sun and the Java community to make things a little simpler, and seems to have influenced JEE5.

Struts is another MVC framework which Keith covered which is apparently more popular (has been around for longer) and also tries to make things easier for developers. With Struts you have one controller servlet which marshalls requests of to specific helper servlets to process actions.

Ruby-on-rails was also mentioned as a more recent arrival on the scene which has generated much debate amongst many development communities, Java included. Keith mentioned the J Ruby project and the two Ruby developers which were recruited by Sun to spearhead it.

There was some talk near the end of the session concerning the recent open-sourcing of the various Java components and Suns possible motives, Keith put a positive spin on his impression of the move and that seemed to be the consensus in the room.

See Also: OSDC 2006 | Web Development | Notes Index

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