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I was too young to see the EJB fad and when people made all of these decisions to use things like WebSphere. Did they make any sense in their own time? Today th

I was too young to see the EJB fad and when people made all of these decisions to use things like WebSphere. Did they make any sense in their own time? Today they seem remarkably silly. Especially WebSphere, which is so horribly slow and broken I don't understand why anyone would have chosen to use it besides "nobody got fired for choosing IBM."

geodel 9y ago
Well people still choose bloated and horribly slow text editors and claim they are amazing because zillions of plugins and customizations are available. Websphere was similarly popular because it could integrate with 100s of frameworks that developers/enterprises might be using in their applications. So it still makes sense in same way when now people claim web apps/wrappers are solution to all client side software and if it feels bloated and slow, tough luck, "Why don't you upgrade to some over-spec'd machines?"
sk5t 9y ago
Hard to say... it was a comparatively darker time for information availability. Other odd, awkward, over-puffed products like ATG Dyanmo, Plumtree, Interwoven, etc., were killing it in the market too. I was really green in enterprise software then, and Websphere's suggestion of useful clustering, configuration management, managed pooling, etc., seemed tantalizing. (Look how long it takes to start up--it must be doing useful and complicated stuff!) That said, it didn't take all that long for Tomcat, JBoss, and others to eat its lunch on projects not rolling along on enormous sunk costs into IBM tech. I never actually dug into EJBs or wacky things like container-managed Javamail. Some colleagues did. They spent a lot of time struggling with the tooling. And now I'm just remembering VisualAge for Java. /shudder/
tootie 9y ago
No. I mean, there are still people in the industry today who think Java EE is the greatest, but I recall it making no sense the first time I saw it. The Java app server space was fractious at the time and I spent a lot of time with ATG Dynamo which was proprietary but had a fantastic design for the time and was very innovative. J2EE felt like a big step back. It got some adoption from IT architects who only know how to follow trends, but most of us just spent some time in the wilderness until Spring came along to rescue us.

geodel 9y ago

Well people still choose bloated and horribly slow text editors and claim they are amazing because zillions of plugins and customizations are available. Websphere was similarly popular because it could integrate with 100s of frameworks that developers/enterprises might be using in their applications. So it still makes sense in same way when now people claim web apps/wrappers are solution to all client side software and if it feels bloated and slow, tough luck, "Why don't you upgrade to some over-spec'd machines?"

sk5t 9y ago

Hard to say... it was a comparatively darker time for information availability. Other odd, awkward, over-puffed products like ATG Dyanmo, Plumtree, Interwoven, etc., were killing it in the market too. I was really green in enterprise software then, and Websphere's suggestion of useful clustering, configuration management, managed pooling, etc., seemed tantalizing. (Look how long it takes to start up--it must be doing useful and complicated stuff!) That said, it didn't take all that long for Tomcat, JBoss, and others to eat its lunch on projects not rolling along on enormous sunk costs into IBM tech. I never actually dug into EJBs or wacky things like container-managed Javamail. Some colleagues did. They spent a lot of time struggling with the tooling. And now I'm just remembering VisualAge for Java. /shudder/

tootie 9y ago

No. I mean, there are still people in the industry today who think Java EE is the greatest, but I recall it making no sense the first time I saw it. The Java app server space was fractious at the time and I spent a lot of time with ATG Dynamo which was proprietary but had a fantastic design for the time and was very innovative. J2EE felt like a big step back. It got some adoption from IT architects who only know how to follow trends, but most of us just spent some time in the wilderness until Spring came along to rescue us.