Thank God Java EE Is Not Like Ajax 236
Slightlyright writes, "Java Developer's Journal reports that some people in the community are wishing that "Java EE would be more Ajax-like because 'EJB 3.0 can not save Java EE.' This has caused strong reactions from bloggers such as Rich Internet Application pioneer Coach Wei, who wrote: 'Which aspect of Ajax [do] we really want Java EE to be like? The difficulty in developing Ajax code? The difficulty in maintaining Ajax code? The extreme fragile nature of Ajax code? The extremely fragmented nature of Ajax support from different browsers?'"
You mean the buzz? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't Ajax Javascript? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You mean the buzz? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Which aspect of Ajax? (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple (Score:2, Insightful)
What does AJAX have to do with Java? (Score:5, Insightful)
p.s. There is a reason why Java has withstood the test of time (for 11 years anyways) and that's because it is good platform and a robust one at that.
Re:Which aspect of Ajax? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because if 1 out of 40 S/W Eng. are capable of understanding a javascript function call, then by God I deserve more money.
Not useful, not particularly entertaining... (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, there is no careful description of the problem. A problem is the difference between the way things are and the way you want them to be. This takes into account the way things are that already acceptable. AJAX has some deficiencies, and it has some attractions. My questions are: Is it worth the effort to correct those deficiencies in AJAX? Is it worth the effort to include the attrations in EJ?
Secondly, there is no concensus on the appropriate domain for the different tools. Is EJ really a tool for doing the same things that AJAX does?
Thank God (Score:4, Insightful)
Ajax and Java are two completely different ideas/concepts. Second, if AJAX is hard and you do Java, you need to have your head examined. It's probably dyslexia, and you've been writing perl, not Java this whole time. Not to say if you know Java you know Ajax, completely untrue, but if you think it's hard that's a different story.
Re:Which aspect of Ajax? (Score:5, Insightful)
AJAX, and multiple other web technologies, suffer from being judged with criteria determined by the critic. In tech this translates into multile disciplines. UI guys love AJAX if used properly - the same build could be looked at from an app programmer's perspective as junk.
AJAX seems to address the cultural side of things. People love flashy things, especially if they can deliver 80% -90% of the functionality they want. An application developer may be able to deliver 100% of wanted functionality, but in a way that a user finds aesthetically displeasing.
I think this brings up an interesting point. When do developers start to realize that users will not conform to what they should do, but what they want to do? Learning the aspects of a development technology inside and out will not give a developer this edge. Paying attention to social aspects will.
I think that's what these guys meant when they said qualified to learn.
Re:What does AJAX have to do with Java? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's really kind of funny actually because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Which aspect of Ajax? (Score:1, Insightful)
*sigh*. We're trying to hire people again...it's not going well...
Re:...of course, the real problem is that... (Score:3, Insightful)
The web was built up on the need to make easily accessible complex documentation using a markup language and hypertext links at first.
Because the browser gave the impression the easy access to documents means the browser is a one-size fits all solution to every content, everywhere many peoples dedicated most of the last 10 years to fill holes to make it behave like the client-server applications already existing just before the web tsunami hit the IT world.
I'm not sure it is really less trouble to program and interactive decent client-server application with the web interface then without it.
Re:You mean the buzz? (Score:3, Insightful)
Java EE is *different* from AJAX, and vice-versa (Score:5, Insightful)
Java EE is a framework to write business applications, for any kind of business, from issue trackers to ERP, the "business" in it doesn't mean "$$$ business" literally.
When writing business applications, it tries to enforce you to separate your concerns, especially, the presentation layer (Servlets & JSP), the business logic (EJB) and enterprize information systems (EIS) (JDBC, EJB container managed persistence etc). Its a complete stack for developing applications.
AJAX deals with presentation layer, and more specifically, the interaction part of it. its a piece in the whole stack. The Java EE presentation layer does NOT depend on even having an HTML frontend even! (no sane framework does!).
So now, if you have an HTML/XML browser frontend and a human user using it, you may use AJAX for enhanced user experiece. There is nothing in Java EE that says you cannot take your favorite AJAX toolkit and use that to build your frontend.
So both technologies are not even competing on even a single issue. Both are complementary. You can use Java EE stack to develop your application, and when time comes to develop the frontend, you choose from plain old HTML, XHTML, XML, AJAX etc (or a combination thereof), to develop your application's "frontend".
Please stop this ignorant war. To make another bad
Religion aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
- Java EE
- CORBA using C, C++, Pascal, and Java
- Microsoft DCOM
- Various proprietary protocols
AJAX isn't really a distributed software development technology... it's a sloppy mixture of features written by a varied group of contributors. What makes it interesting, is that no matter how implemented, the goal is the same. I think that's what the writer of this article was trying to articulate. With Java, there's only ONE way to do anything. Drink the punch, or don't use Java. If you dare suggest that any part of Java needs work, you get a room full of angry & militant Java advocates ready to stone you into submission. I'd like to say that I'm exaggerating, and I am, but only a little. I too wish that Java engineers could think outside of the "sandbox," instead of encouraging others to make due.
RTFA!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
What was meant by this is that Ajax is a loose collection of cooperating technologies, without a standard, that develops very rapidly, and allows a lot of choices to the developer -- as opposed to Java EE as a rigid platform. Kind of like Linux vs BSD.
Even TFA understood this in the response.
The Slashdot response, so far, is roughly equivalent to if I said I wish Java had something like CPAN, and people jumped all over me with comments like "You want Java to use
It's like a Wikipedia of code -- NO! Not in that anyone can edit any module. It's like Wikipedia in that it's a central repository of the collective programming skill of mankind. It's sort of the library to end all libraries.
Anyway. -1 Offtopic to the entire comment section this time. RTFA!
So basically (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You mean the buzz? (Score:4, Insightful)
Edsger Dijkstra was a troll. His "goto" paper is one of the most obvious examples of this. Now, just because you are a troll, doesn't mean you aren't right at times. Dijkstra was right almost all of the time. He rightly criticized a lot of "best practices" of his day. And coming from academia, he had the advantage of not having to offer anything better. Which he, by the way, didn't. Dijkstra preferred to write provably correct code in non-existing languages. Which is fine in academia...
There are plenty. A quick web-search will likely reveal that there are more of them than you can expect to read in a full year. Programming is no longer such a niche area that a single professor can write a troll that will be quoted by almost everyone 30 years later.
But if Dijkstra lived today, he wouldn't even touch web-programming with a ten-foot pole. He would have been more likely to start by proving some formal properties of a new system designed for the same purpose as web-programming, but never implemented it himself. He would then write papers advocating people start using this system instead of the web. And he would be right, his system would be better... if it only ever got made!
It's not that people don't know web-programming as it exists today is too difficult. It's just that we fail to have better alternatives.
If you had read Dijkstras paper instead of just quoting the title, you would see that this is not in his spirit at all. See also my above comments.
Javascript is ubiquitous, Java VM is non-portable (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe it's good advertising for Java though, because Javascript runs everywhere whereas it's extremely hard to get Java running, so that Java apps are "write once, run almost nowhere". (I'm serious.)
I have 15 machines here, spanning virtually every O/S and flavour. Over the years, I've managed to install one version of Java on only 2 of them, while all attempts with all the leading flavours of Java fail catastrophically on all the other machines. And as for applications, I've tried hundreds on the 2 machines where the install succeeded, and the only one that has ever worked for me is the Jext editor.
In my experience, Java is utterly non-portable, and the "write once, run anywhere" thing is one of the biggest deceits in computing, pure propaganda. Java is the most non-portable language system I've ever come across, and I run pretty much everything here.
C, C++, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Lua, many flavours of LISP, Ocaml, Prolog, Pascal, Tcl,
I'd like to be more generous to Java because I love its syntax and semantics in the abstract, but a language that I can't use for applications because it just refuses to install or because it refuses to allow apps to run is useless to me.
So, dispensing with generosity, Java is utterly non-portable, and hence effectively is a useless pile of crap despite the collosal "run anywhere" lie. End of story.
Re:You mean the buzz? (Score:3, Insightful)
We could all do with being a little less reactionary IMO.
Re:AJAX between JS and Java servlets (Score:1, Insightful)
I think the biggest buzzword has become... buzzword.
Re:Javascript is ubiquitous, Java VM is non-portab (Score:4, Insightful)
Having read your other post, I almost dare not reply, but here goes...
What sort of app were you trying to get running? I've spent the best part of 6 years now writing web apps in Java, and have never had any problems getting them running on different systems. I develop under Windows, the apps are built on Windows, and are almost always deployed to Linux boxes, and we've not had any problems.
I can't vouch for applets (which I've never done, but they are historically a complete pain in the arse, although I believe that situation has improved) or client-side applications, but on the server, I'm not aware of there being any problems.
That's not to say that the language doesn't have issues (every language does, and Java is no exception), but I've never seen any relating to portability (again, not saying they don't happen, just relating my experience, for what little it's worth).
Re:AJAX between JS and Java servlets (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow. Talk about bad comparisons (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, that is actually the point of the article... That Java EE shouldn't be a bunch of specs for implementation, that it should be a bunch of loosely coupled ideas that end up getting something done. I mean, AJAX originally stood for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, but today, you see things that don't use XML and aren't asynchronous using the buzzword. Ajax is 'just a bunch of ideas'.
Of course, those ideas are based on Javascript, html, cascading stylesheets, the XMLHTTPRequest function in browsers, etc. If these things weren't all spec'd out, Ajax wouldn't have come into existence. The article makes it seem like the author is somewhat against specs, so I find this rather ironic.
A little clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
JSPs and Servlets, with or without EJBs, can be (and are) used for web-based user interfaces on the Internet, although on their own they suffer scalability problems for concurrent access by many users and for speed of prototyping and developement of new features.
They are, however, pretty orthogonal to AJAX since they are server-side technologies. Both an Javascript controlled asynchronous HTTP request comming from a browser and a user triggered browser HTTP request look exactly the same to both JSPs and Servlets - they're just another HTTP request (HTTP/1.1 GET
Saying that J2EE should be more like AJAX is like saying that PHP should be more like AJAX or that CGI-scripts should be more like AJAX - complete nonsense!!!
Having better architectural support in J2EE for AJAX (for example, for being able to access a server-side business function in Javascript from the browser just as easilly as you can do it from the JSP layer) would be a good thing. However the groundwork need to support this on the server (J2EE) side is already done (it's called Web Services), and thus the biggest part of the work still needed to seamless provide the Javascript/AJAX code running on the browser with access to such remotely hosted business functions is
Just as a reminder, AJAX is the kludge it is because there's so very little standardized functionality in the browser to allow dynamic, localized refreshing on a page of information which is externally hosted.
To wrap things up: server-side support is there already in J2EE that provides, via HTTP, seamless access to business functions hosted in a J2EE server. Whether the requester is a piece of AJAXified-Javascript running on a browser or a batch C application makes no different. As usual, most of the necessary stuff missing, is missing from the browser.
To the writter of the article: Server-side technologies are mature already, AJAX is far from it. Stop demanding that servers are adjusted to serve a single client implementation methodology. If you really want an architecturally sound solution, get up from your fat ass and start coding a Web Services client in Javascript.
Who really wants what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading through the comments shows a number of competing needs. It got me to thinking about who exactly is asking for the various technologies. This is what I'm seeing.
Notice the users haven't been mentioned in the last couple of entries. Developers and system folks have been playing with technologies, but the users have just been taking it. Now users are flexing their muscles again and they want to go back to the days of responsive, more easy to use applications.
So what do we do? We take the technologies we have all become very familiar with and try to force it to meet these needs. Unfortunately the technology was never really intended for this usage.
All of this leads to my question, Who really wants what? Well, as I see it