Re: WebObjects vs J2EE?
Re: WebObjects vs J2EE?
- Subject: Re: WebObjects vs J2EE?
- From: "John Bruce" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2007 14:26:24 +1100
Hi Ian,
This may or may not be helpful but I have started looking into porting
an existing WO 5.2.3 app to Java EE 5. I havn't done any formal
comparisons or analysis but here are some things that struck me early
on:
EJB 3.0
Gone are the days or XML descriptors and three classes to just map one
database table. POJO's + annotations make doing the ORM stuff really
easy even without a modelling tool. Some things I liked were Java 5
enum mapping - in my WO apps I just custom classes for enum properties
on EO's. It works ok but being able to model them directly is nicer.
As the persistence engine can vary from app server to app server for
EJB 3.0 you can still end up using propriatory extensions and also
they can work differently with different DBs. I have some problems
getting hibernate to work well with Frontbase. Also data validation
via annotation is quite useful - a hibernate extension that can be
used with other persistence managers.
Generally though I like EJB 3 and it certainly does make that whole
process easier. With dependency injection you can just annotate the
data manager (like the EOEnterpriseContext) and the container will
give it to you ready to go. Although I'm sure there are things you can
do in ec's that you can't do in EJB 3.
One thing is that all the configuration is done with annotations. I
guess it's too early to tell if this will be better or worse in the
long run than XML descriptors. Other things like message driven beans
are useful for asynchronous processing and I found they made some
things I was doing in WO for background processing easier.
JSF
The whole JSF thing is a bit odd. I think the tech is ok and does the
job, what's odd are all the different implementations. I think it
would be easy to end up in a situation where you want some components
from one JSF implementation and other ones from a different
implementation, which could get a bit annoying. Also the html output
from JSF is not necessarily the best.
I mention JSF here because I didn't want to use servlets directly or
jsp. one of the issues with Java EE is that there are quite a few
different toolkits for rendering the presentation layer. I think it
all depends on what you are trying to do. I quite liked the EJB + JSF
integration that JBoss Seam provides and I think it has some nice
ideas but can take a little getting use to.
Web Services
Why oh why does Java make web services so complicated? A major
fustration here is that Java EE 5 does make web services development
easier but you need to be running in a fully Java EE 5 complient app
server... now this start to get more interesting when you want to use
a framework like Seam that works *best* on JBoss. I had a lot of isses
getting a simple web service to work straight away on JBoss 4.0.5 and
5 beta 1. Glassfish it was really easy to do though. On the other hand
doing with Ruby on Rails took about 10 mins of reading and 5 mins of
coding.
One of the key reasons I started looking at Java EE again was I was
going to have to do more web service work and WO just doesn't seam to
be developing much in that area.
Summary
Being able to use Java 5 and I guess now Java 6. WO had a big head
start on the rest of the Java server market and indeed the whole web
development market but as development has slowed over the years other
applications servers and frameworks have start to catch up. I think
Java EE 5 is definitely work looking into. It's not as slow and eye
pokingly painful to develop with as it used to be. On the performance
side of things perhaps just being able to deploy with Java 6 might be
a significant enough boost. There are some interesting reports of Java
6 vs Java 5 for speed etc.
Any way hope some of this helps.
Cheers,
John
On 1/9/07, Ian Joyner <email@hidden> wrote:
I have searched around but can't find any papers on direct
comparisons of WebObjects vs J2EE. Does anyone know of sources that
address such questions as:
Comparison of features
Ease of development/deployment
and the biggy: PERFORMANCE
Also does anyone have any feelings about performance of WO 4.5.1
(Objective-C) vs 5.3.1 (Java)? Did 5.x increase the performance in
any big way?
Thanks
Ian
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