Bill Roth on why you can't understand J2EE: You're too dumb
Sun's Bill Roth writes:
Two main criticisms are leveled at J2EE. First, it's too complicated. After looking at the specifications, this is a reasonable conclusion. Second, it's too hard to use. From a review of many sample applications, this is also a reasonable conclusion. However, both of these criticisms are misguided and specious.
Here's my take: J2EE is targeted at writing distributed applications. Very few people actually need distributed applications. If you're one of those who do, you're pretty darn psyched to be using a platform that was designed for it. Of course, this focus didn't stop the app server vendors as overselling it as *the* solution for scalable web apps. There are legions of app server customers paying a hefty complexity tax each time they try to write a single tier, zero-reuse, barely OO web application and deploy it to a JMS/JNI/EJB/etc overkill server. The term POJO - plain old java object - was coined to capture the idea that you usually don't need anything more than the basic Java SDK to get your work done, and the simplicity of APIs will lead to more testable robust code. Sun as a company has money to be made by keeping the platform complex, and justifying the licensing fees paid by app server vendors. It's too bad their economic incentive runs counter to POJO common sense.
Java Complexity vs. .NET: Why Petshop's benchmarks are a waste of time
Anyway, .NET was nominally designed to take on Java/J2EE, but it's focus and tools have been targeted on the biggest marketplace - corporate coders who build single-tier RAD applications. They don't need the overhead of object relational mapping, they want to drag and drop and bind things. Sun/Bea/IBM has been falling all over themselves to justify their app server prices to people who don't need them, and have almost completely ignored this market.
The platform proponents who argue about .NET/Java superiority pretty much ignore that the technologies are really trying to achieve different business goals, and instead they end up responding to MS and Sun's marketing message that each platform is the end-all and be-all for development.
I've written many applications for web sites that run 24x7, serving thousands of simultaneous users, millions per month, on load balanced web servers, and I've done all this without ever touching a compiler or deploying an EJB. Alright, I know I'm just rehashing Phil Greenspun's app-server rant from the last decade, so I'll stop now.
Good discussion on theserverside.
3:19:33 PM 
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