Cedric Beust, Jim Knutson, John Crupi, Mike Burba, Floyd Marinescu, Rick Ross, and Rod Johnson examine the challenges the J2EE community faces moving forward. Issues discussed include the complexity of J2EE, the effectiveness of standardization by committee, whether AOP will replace EJB, whether disparate tooling will hurt us against Microsoft, and how we can simplify J2EE based on lessons we've learned from the past.

Watch The Future of J2EE Panel, filmed at TheServerSide Java Symposium, June 2003

A bunch of dogs barking loud about their back grounds and a frame work for high school diploma holders!!!

It was very generous of TSS to share this content with the community.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to stare at a grainy two-hour video. I would have been much happier with a transcript, which would have cost much less for TSS to produce and distribute.

Also, if TSS chooses to webcast their symposium this year, I hope that TSS will consider using a broadcast tape delay. I do not want my children inadvertently exposed to Cedric Beust wardrobe malfunctions.

Agreed. Having a video feed that doesn't require Windows Media Player 9, would be nice too. Makes it hard for most Linux J2EE developers to watch these interviews.

I echo Jim's opinion. People using Linux / Unix workstations are unable to view the video at all, and it's a shame to be missing out :(

>unable to view the video at all, and it's a shame to be missing out :(

I agree! I would like to see those video from my Linux workstation, too.

"created once, viewable everywhere"

Actually, the feed work nicely in Linux.

Go to the web-page containing the "plugin" for Media Player and check the source-code. Copy the URL to the stream and feed it to Xine:

xine mms://CHICAGO130.hostj2ee.com/FUTURE_J2EE_PANEL_ASF/PANEL_PART1_DSL.ASF

(This is running Xine 0.9.23 on Debian unstable).

A bit awkward - but it works...

//Anders

I agree about the transcript. Transscripts are very useful. In fact at the company I am currently on a project at, I can't watch video (they block streams) so it's useless to me anyway.

I think we need a trasncript for this because video on web is still an issue in many workplaces beacause of bandwidth and broadband's unavailability.

Cheers..
Vishal

Corby:
Also, if TSS chooses to webcast their symposium this year, I hope that TSS will consider using a broadcast tape delay. I do not want my children inadvertently exposed to Cedric Beust wardrobe malfunctions.

You'd be missing out, TiVo announced it was the most replayed tv moment of its history.

--
Cedric

Not all of us have a problem with videos, For those who can view them they are a great convienince...

My biggest problem is that these videos aren't searchable. I don't want to sit through a multi hour video just to find the bits that I'm looking for. Transcripts are searchable and browsable.

One of you whiners should just watch the video, type up your own transcript, and share it with everybody. You can type, can't you?

The whole, "my time is too precious" thing is bull. You have time to browse TheServerSide all day long, but not to watch a video?

;)

I love the videos!! Keep 'em coming ServerSide! (A Linux compatible format would be nice, however).

I would much rather read these video casts that watch them.

I'm not too interested in what the guy was wearing or where he was standing... I only want to know what he said!

Damn... video or transcript. You get what you get.

On the real side, "whether AOP will replace EJB" - do you mean AOP as in Aspect programming? AOP as an EJB replacement? If this is the AOP you mean, you guys must be smoking crack.

Look, lemme give you a hint as to how to replace EJBs: look at what Microsoft did, copy it, and improve it. End of story. Maybe someone will get the end result out faster than JSF too, which took for-freakin-ever.

As for disparate tooling hurting, that's an obvious yes. I couldn't find 1 tool to do EJBs on JBoss. JBuilderX generates incorrect jbosscmp-jdbc.xml, WSAD doesn't support it, Eclipse only supports xdoclet, and intellj only creates beans/descriptors without xdcolet. JBuilder was the closest, but it was creating errors and was the most unseable piece of crap.

The .NET guys have support for all the cool stuff: Web service, remoting, desktop, web (which is the equiv of JSF plus other stuff), web components (which taglibs still suck at), and the long list goes on. I'm sick of hearing about how .NET is easier this, faster that.

Conclusion: the mentality of the java community MUST change or Micorosft will kill it. Open source is truely the double edged sword.

No reply yet regards the subject matter. Without the Linux audience there's no valuable chat.

The video was great!! Thanks for providing it..

I am relatively new to Java/J2EE. I have worked for many years on Mainframes and have learnt Java/J2EE enough to get certified.I have no knowledge of .NET. After watching this video, I am beginning to think that it may be a good idea to go the .NET route.

1) .NET or J2EE decision in an organization is usually taken a very high level, where people are very far from developement and the the things in Java that developers like. Isn't Microsoft is very good at appealing to these people?

2) What will prevent Microsoft from using only the good things from J2EE and the open source innovations and add their own on top of them, while IBM, BEA etc struggle to be compliant with standards (and compatibility with earlier versions).

3) As a developer if I say that I worked in C#, that is enough to get me an entry into any Microsoft shop, but if I say I know Java,J2EE, JSP and Servlets I may not gain entry into a Java shop. People will see whether I worked on Websphere or Weblogic or JBoss etc. So, as a developer even if Java has 60% market share, for all practical purposes I may be useful to only 10 to 15% of Market that uses the Application Server(s)/IDE(s) that I worked on whereas as as a Microsoft developer, I may be considered useful in any Microsoft shop.

4) How often do companies port tool, Language,Appserver,database, platform? Does commitment to Java/J2EE really prevent companies from Vendor lock-in or check Vendors from becoming Monopolistic.

5) I am seeing many adverts for developers who know both J2EE and .NET! Is it possible that most of the organizations in future would use both instead of choosing between them?

I request all J2EE experts to please give their opinion on this without being too emotional.

Pawar.

WHO I AM
---------
I am software engineer working in client server environment with oracle forms ,reports and PL SQL .

PANEL:
---------
After seeing the video i really lost confidence on J2EE . First of all The panel members LOST FOCUS SINCE THEY ARE GETTING EMOTIONAL.Also the PANEL has made .NET famous and reliable - by exposing out.


REACHING OUT :
---------------
The J2EE community can among themselves be good or famous or powerful or whatever...but as long as they dont REACH everyone else they cannot be effective and feasible .
To survive in the IT market they should concentrate on REACHING all the categories of customers in the IT market.


EXAMPLE:
--------
WHAT SELLS MORE A CLASSICAL SYMPHONY AUDIO OR A HIP HOP / ALTERNATIVE /POP ETC MUSIC...obviously not symphony - the greatness and power of which only composers know . It cannot REACH like other POP/ALTERNATIVE etc.

CONCLUSION :
-------------
MICROSOFT IN MORE FOCUSSED ON WHAT IT WANTS AND HOW TO GET IT
J2EE COMMUNITY IN MORE PASSIONATE ABOUT TECHNOLOGY AND THINKING SELF ORIENTED.

THE RESULT WUD BE MICROSOFT WONT KILL J2EE ..........BUT ALWAYS MAINTAINS ITS SUPERIORITY KEEPING AN EYE ON J2EE & EXPLOITING J2EE's TECHNOLOGY AND USING THAT TO PROSPER AND WIN BY MAKING THAT TECHNOLOGY REACH EVERYONE BUT IN ITS OWN WAY.


A WORD OF THANKS TO THE CARTOONIST:
-----------------------------------

I wud like to thank and appreciate the cartoon featured in TSS , about the criminals of project failure.Its explained more than the whole panel discussion once again proving that picture paints 100o words.

Please observe the drawing.By analysing the cartoon and the body language of the characters , i immediately got the big picture -

J2EE programmer is looking like a super intellectual and highly talented guy who is MAD about programming , who eats and breaths programming .

But on the other hand .NET programmer is lazy , un intellectual , freaky and normal guy looking as if he needs to do NOT MUCH to get things done (Using .NET ). That explains the whole thing .

According to discussion developers are the one who push and recommend the software . When .NET is so easy and REACHING developer community so well, obviously that wud be pushed UP in the market the reason being its SIMPLE and thats why FAST to get things done using it.

I've developed software for 15 years professionally. Five and half years of that was working at Microsoft. Also worked on a .NET persistence project while there.

Today - I've relegated .NET to doing just client-side development for my projects.

We're a heterogeneous computing environment. We need IT technologies that run multi-platform. We need to be able to easily deploy server-side software we develop to both Windows and Unix (and eventually probably Linux).

We do distributed applications yet for most part these are internal systems. Messaging middle-ware works far better than Microsoft's one-trick pony of web services SOAP RPC or .NET Remoting RPC. Their own MSMQ is a joke solution.

So our IT is moving in direction of server-side development based on Java J2EE and we've purchased a JMS product that has excellent C# .NET client support.

What I like about J2EE is that it is architecturally more advanced than .NET and ASP.NET. It addresses capabilities such as JMS connectivity. Again, ASP.NET is basically a one trick pony of web services. They have no architecture thought given to message processing. A crappy C# wrapper over MSMQ which has a really crappy heterogeneous story, sucks to program to, and there's no server architecture thinking in ASP.NET to accommodate it.

(Like who the heck conceived ASP.NET? What a miserable excuse for an app server. ASP.NET is kind of like the Visual Basic of application servers. Is quick and pretty easy to do a few things at modest scale but is something you stay away from like the plague when you have heavy lifting and serious enterprise systems to devise that involve strategic long term consideration. It's a system that demonstrates a complete lack of thinking about a number of issues that have gone into J2EE the spec and the various J2EE implementations.)

Also, we've enjoyed a luxury of vendor choices for various Java products that just doesn't exist in the Microsoft space. We've looked at three major JMS vendor products and several J2EE app servers.

Beyond that there is an active Java open source development community that dwarfs what exist for .NET. And I can't begin to stress how crucial the open source tools are!

It is obvious that Java owns more mind share amongst open source development than .NET (and that's despite the open source fanatics constantly bitching at Sun for not making Java open source). There are great tools that can be used such as XDoclet, JAXB, JBoss, Hibernate, Tomcat, Ant, etc., etc.

There are lots of third party products. (Need high quality JMX applications to manage and configure JBoss? You can readily get them.)

There's some of this kind of stuff in the .NET space but there's just a great deal more in the Java universe. For instance, there is the Sun JDO reference implementation, many other JDO implementations, and then there's open source Hibernate (and I haven't even mentioned J2EE CMP solutions here). Yet the notion of tool-based and/or framework managed persistence in the .NET world is still pretty much regarded as "crazy talk". There are some solutions there but they're pretty few and pretty anemic relative to the Java universe.

Wild horses couldn't drag me back into the .NET ghetto away from Java and J2EE for server-side development.

One thing I will say about Java community, though, is that it is chalk full of whiners that are constantly nagging about this or that with what seems like little appreciation for the embarrassing riches they enjoy as Java developers. And I almost feel like belly laughing when I see a posting about how .NET is going to trounce Java and J2EE because it's doing this better or that better. In all the areas in where it really counts in serious IT considerations, .NET has not caught up, and relative to the pace of Java innovation is slipping behind further. There are new ideas of computing that Java developers routinely toss around that vast majority of .NET programmers have never heard of. They truly live in a rather closeted computing ghetto.

Yeah, what Roger said.

He sad that J2EE is a much more serious plataform than .NET
I think you are a .NET user, so you can´t understand many things behind Microsoft walls.

sdfsdfsdfsda

it'd b nice if u post an article on "j2ee future",
v r desperately waiting for that.

this video was nice indeed.