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I think all of this was true 4 years ago. But Java EE 6 has changed a lot of this. My main experience has been on the Microsoft stack, but I have learned and wo

I think all of this was true 4 years ago. But Java EE 6 has changed a lot of this. My main experience has been on the Microsoft stack, but I have learned and worked with a lot of tech, including Rails and Django. Last year I worked on a project for which we chose Java EE 6. There's a lot of good stuff there; for instance simple, bloat-free architecture, JPA (the new persistence architecture), CDI (context and dependency injection), JAX-RS (REST), JSF + PrimeFaces (very productive front-end development) and lightweight, fast web application servers (Tomcat 7, Glassfish). And you have access, when and if you need it, to a very mature, stable and capable set of libraries, open source projects and tools. Plus the ability to deploy to almost anywhere including PaaS platforms. So I think there's a lot to like in modern Java.

KenCochrane 14y ago
For what it is worth, I have used Java 7, JPA (with hibernate), tomcat 7 and glassfish, and I didn't notice much difference. Jersey (JAX-RS) is pretty nice, one of the better libraries to come out of Java in a while. I do agree that Java is moving in the right direction, but it is a very slow progression. I think the major cause of the slowness is because of the fact that SUN was bought by Oracle, and it took a little while for that to settle down, and now things are slowly moving forward again. One of the things that Java did right was their WAR files. It is the envy of most other programming languages. You compile your WAR file, and deploy anywhere assuming it is a compliant servlet container. I wish Python had something like this. You are right the popularity of PaaS's like dotCloud make it much easier to deploy and run your application. On dotCloud you just need to push up your WAR file, and you are running, by far the easiest of all the languages to deploy. I really like Java as a language, I just think it has a long way to go on the web application front, before it can catch up to the features and speed of development of the other languages.
- swah 14y ago
  For folks outside of JavaEE, its common to deploy jars though. I have never run the software that takes .wars.
  - KenCochrane 14y ago
    You deployed jars for web applications? War files are not JavaEE, you might be thinking of EAR files. A war file is just a jar file with a different name and manifest, and expects a few things, WEB-INF directory with a web.xml and that is about it. More info can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAR_file_format_(Sun) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAR_file_format_(Sun)
    - swah 14y ago
      Sorry for my mistake, I associate WAR files with Application containers like JBoss and (IIRC) Tomcat. I only deployed with embedded jetty :)

KenCochrane 14y ago

For what it is worth, I have used Java 7, JPA (with hibernate), tomcat 7 and glassfish, and I didn't notice much difference. Jersey (JAX-RS) is pretty nice, one of the better libraries to come out of Java in a while. I do agree that Java is moving in the right direction, but it is a very slow progression. I think the major cause of the slowness is because of the fact that SUN was bought by Oracle, and it took a little while for that to settle down, and now things are slowly moving forward again. One of the things that Java did right was their WAR files. It is the envy of most other programming languages. You compile your WAR file, and deploy anywhere assuming it is a compliant servlet container. I wish Python had something like this. You are right the popularity of PaaS's like dotCloud make it much easier to deploy and run your application. On dotCloud you just need to push up your WAR file, and you are running, by far the easiest of all the languages to deploy. I really like Java as a language, I just think it has a long way to go on the web application front, before it can catch up to the features and speed of development of the other languages.

swah 14y ago
For folks outside of JavaEE, its common to deploy jars though. I have never run the software that takes .wars.
- KenCochrane 14y ago
  You deployed jars for web applications? War files are not JavaEE, you might be thinking of EAR files. A war file is just a jar file with a different name and manifest, and expects a few things, WEB-INF directory with a web.xml and that is about it. More info can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAR_file_format_(Sun) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAR_file_format_(Sun)
  - swah 14y ago
    Sorry for my mistake, I associate WAR files with Application containers like JBoss and (IIRC) Tomcat. I only deployed with embedded jetty :)