Re: EJBs are nonsense (was: Re: *URGENT* -- Call for support)

["Chris Trawick" <hazard@lords.com>]

> Hi James, Falko,

hey there


> > > > * EJB market is a huge potential for ODBMS
>
> > Or should we just switch to EJB?
> > Or am I completely wrong?...

<snips here and there>

> EJBs are awful, as long as
> - you have to code them from hand
> - performant database mapping is not widely provided
> - the standard is not widely adopted
>
> If an IDE would automate all the work perfectly (not likely to happen) and
> there would be a bugfree and superfast server (will never happen) I would
> reconsider my judgement.

Check out Webgain Studio (www.webgain.com) and Weblogic (www.bea.com).  If
it weren't for those two products, I would completely agree with your
statements.  However they are decidedly NOT free...  jBoss is attempting to
be a J2EE-compliant server, but Weblogic goes one step further to provide
easy interfaces to address some of the issues above plus high-availability
and load balancing.  The reast of them are covered by Webgain, which is
really just Cafe after BEA and Macromedia got done with it.  Again they're
not free, but they suit our business needs for now.  Once they're are Open
Source alternatives (i sure as hell wouldn't want to be the one to code
them) then you can believe that i'll switch over.


> If I would need to code business-logic I would not want to worry about
> session- entity- stateless- or whatever-beans.
> Three concepts are necessary:
> - callbacks for load, store and remove.
> - rights
> - transaction management.
>
> What is the rest of this complex EJB mess useful for?

Abstract business rules, load balancing, high availability, and other
"trivial" enterprise functionality.  ;)


> >From my point of view EJB are a terrible approach to create a standard
for
> an object-relational mapping layer.
> Kick'em, if you can use a working object database.

Where will business rules reside?  In the database?  Historically, this
kills performance.  In the application?  Kinda defeats the purpose.
Somewhere else?  What will be the interoperability standard?  JDO?  AFAIK,
JDO wasn't made for that.  EJB was, plus everything else JDO can do.


> EJB are a strange phenomena:

I agree completely.  Raw chaos, I say.


> Lots of consultants that don't know what they are doing hype a foolish
> concept.

Well there are uses, though consultants really just throw it around as a
buzzword.  This time a couple years ago they were pimping data warehousing,
we brought some in, and a year later they gave us a broken schema.  Don't
get me wrong, data warehousing was the perfect solution for us, but beyond
the buzzword the consultants had no idea how to actually use it.


> The reason is straightforward:
> It provides them with more work.

Heh, it provides them work.  Period.


> Kind regards,
> Carl

chris