Java EE 6 Platform Draft Published

synodinos writes "The public draft of the Java EE 6 Platform specification has been published and will remain open for public review and feedback until the 23rd of Feb, 2009. Perhaps the most notable part of this delayed draft is the Web Profile, which is first profile in the history of the Java EE platform. The draft is available for download and contains both the Java EE 6 Spec and the Web Profile Spec. There is a poll running at java.net regarding what the community thinks about the new spec. Although participation is yet rather small the results tend to show that the released draft did not cause any excitement."

JEE 6?

[SirLurksAlot]

I'll settle for 5 at this point. My shop is still using 1.4.2; it feels like I should be writing code on stone tablets! I suspect this is the case in any number of Java shops and it just reinforces the idea that Java is going to become the new COBOL. There is so much "legacy" code out there right now, and because of the inconsistencies between versions I can't see it going away any time soon.

Re:Not surpisingly, uninteresting

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, most people never read the specs (that are normally boring and with a lawyer-like style) but most Sun specs appear to being ignored because of bad timing for appearance (usually too late.) The "hot thing" are mostly the open source frameworks, from which Sun ends copying at the end.

Specifications are not there to innovate, but to define a common set of standards which are meant to be used by different vendors. So copying ideas from open source frameworks are not a bad idea : if you set a standard, would you prefer to use ideas from something that already works in the real life or something "designed by comittee" which would be a PITA to implement and use ?

Look at my face - is it bothered?

[sgodden]

I've been leading the development of Java applications for around 8 years. On that journey, I have used fewer and fewer features of it with each succesive project.

Nowadays, it seems that specs are a kind of summary of what has been learned from the frameworks which were created in the trenches by people that actually needed to deliver.

My latest project, which has been in development for around 1 year, delivers as a plain web application, and uses Hibernate, Google Guice, AspectJ and Echo3.

It's wonderful.

Sun don't have the capability, and I'm not sure that anyone has, to provide a full and relevant specification that will allow code to be developed that will run on any application server from any vendor.

Instead, choose your implementations and go back to good old OO basics to design interfaces behind which to hide those implementation choices. You don't need Sun to do that for you.

Re:JEE 6?

[Dogtanian]

Java 6 has been out for a long time.

This is about Java EE. The spec that application servers implement (EJB, etc). Not the JVM version.

Yeah, well here's an insightful and funny comment [slashdot.org] on (I assume) J2EE:-

My hatred of Java has nothing to do with speed. The platform has become a giant morass of 'enterprisey' 'solutions' that create more need for more 'solutions'. And all Java 'solutions' must somehow involve XML, because it's standard, and enterprisey.

Re:Kudos to the JCP

[Anonymous Coward]

Annotations aren't the biggest improvement of EJB3. It's "Convention over Configuration". A good convention to minimize configuration for trivial cases is the jackpot.

Now it will take a few more years until they reach a standard as productive as Grails.

Java EE Irrelevant?

[ssfsx17]

The only times when I've had to look up the EE APIs these days are when I need a refresher on the guts of a HTTPServletRequest/Response or a SQL Connection. Otherwise, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, derivatives of the previously mentioned items and the like are the de-facto standards.

Re:JEE 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is much much more than the new COBOL. COBOL will be dwarfed by Java when it comes to legacy. Think of it: COBOL was never the language used for the very first programming courses. While Java has the particularity to be both widely used in academic circles and in the Real World [TM].

FedEx, GMail, eBay. All the biggest websites are powered by Java.

We've seen examples of "smart" websites designed by "smart" dudes in a garage using "smart" languages that then couldn't scale and had to be re-written in Java to be able to handle the load. GMail, eBay, FedEx. Enough said for the Web.

You cannot make an electronic payment (wire transfer, e-wallet, whatever, ...) nor remove money from an ATM without having Java involved in the process.

Java's legacy will dwarf COBOL to lenghts that Java haters can only have nightmares of.

I discovered that language last century (already) and I knew it was going to be big.

It's bigger than what any of you Java haters out there can imagine and it's not stopping anytime soon.