Things to like about EJBs

3 ^PM August 29, 2003

These are the things I like about J2EE and EJBs:

J2EE is easy sell to technical management. No justification is required because Sun have already done all the marketing for you.

Many developers know how to program with basic J2EE: The JSP/Servlet/EJB is ubiquitous. Projects don’t have to scratch around to find the skills, or spend time bringing people up to speed.

J2EE provides many Java programmers with their introduction to architecture.

J2EE incorporates a broad swathe of Internet-style technologies – Web, ftp, email, CORBA, Web Services – as well as providing a strong culture of “scalability”.

J2EE can solve a wide variety of problems, even if the individual solutions are not optimal. The same technological platform can be used to solve many kinds of problems.

J2EE is, to a large degree, standardised. Several good commercial and free implementations are available and, to the same degree, compatible. The standards are improving all the time.

J2EE is based on Java, and, as computer languages go, Java is not too bad.

By alang | # | Comments (6)

(Posted to Software Development and Rants)

Comments

At 17:15, 29 Aug 2003 Sue Donym wrote:

I'm glad that finally someone is coming out in defence of EJBs. I'm sick of how everyone puts down EJBs, they're probably just a bunch of l33t php hax0rz who have never needed to write a serios enterprise application!

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At 20:31, 29 Aug 2003 Gabriel Mihalache wrote:

Not all advantages of J2EE apply to EJBs. You can, very well, to code J2EE projects using Hibernate or JDBC.
That's not to say that EJBs aren't great. As far as persistence mechanisms go, BMP and especially CMP are very nice.
I'm not so sure about stateless session beans. They make sense as wrapper for entity beans, but to go as far as to code all your business logic in them... I just don't know. I guess it will show some benefits if you run your EJB container in another VM than your servlet container.

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At 21:25, 29 Aug 2003 Carlos E. Perez wrote:

What's wrong with this blog entry?

The title says "EJB", but almost all but one reason is about the benefits of "J2EE".

I agree that J2EE allows developers to talk on the same page. EJB isn't bad if you use session and message driven beans.

What people really truly dislike is Entity Beans.

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At 04:20, 30 Aug 2003 George wrote:

The parent post got it right. Also, just change all "J2EE" to ".NET" and voila, you see how nicely this fits for Microsoft.

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At 06:33, 03 Sep 2003 Michael Chermside wrote:

Yet another vote against Entity Beans specifically.

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At 16:36, 30 Sep 2003 Hercules wrote:

Okay gentlemen,

How many of you have actually written a serious application? Entity beans are one piece of the puzzle, along with the other EJB's, Struts, Ant, xDoclet, and . The EJB 2.0 spec is actually quite robust compared to even a few years ago, and deployment tools are getting significantly better as is CMP.

Anyone who has not investigated many of the tools surrounding J2EE cannot make an effective argument against it.

We, for example, are creating a web application, using MySQL, JBoss, Struts, and many of the aforementioned tools. It's been a pretty good experience since we have all but one feature that focuses on application code instead of infrastructure code. Gone are the days of coding connection pools and jdbc/odbc code. JMS is great for data integration. And we have developed a modular deployment framework for future upgrades. I'd say gimme J2EE and EJB's any day of the week.

Look again people.

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