J2EE technologies: Dead & Alive?

[Joe Bloque]

I'm going to brush up on the old way

IMHO 'old way' is good to understand how a framework like Spring evolved, but existing/new projects are begining to upgrade or are using new version - It helps to 'catch up' to blag in the interview, atleast.

My question is if all the modern ways still boil down to writing views using JSP, referencing bean objects?

That is my understanding. There are new tools like Google Web Toolkit (GWT) that generate JavaScript and call Service POJOs asynchronously. But the underlying request still goes through a Front controller servlet. IMO, all these frameworks/tools won't make sense unless 'under the hood' is understood. Now-a-days It is pretty unusual for JEE projects not to go with some proven framework in Presentation/Integration layers unless there is some compelling reason not to do so.

[d000hg]

Spring 2.5.x release uses @Annotations instead of XML config files

I'd come across that and it's pretty cool... but I reckon it would be a rarity to find projects using this so I'm going to brush up on the old way.

Writing servlets for presentation layer is so 1999

You mean like manually doing write("<p>Hello world</p>")... agreed, I've seen that used for error pages or writing non-HTML responses e.g AJAX, but most of what I did was JSP. My question is if all the modern ways still boil down to writing views using JSP, referencing bean objects?

[Joe Bloque]

Spring 2.5.x release uses @Annotations instead of XML config files and its MVC framework is comaparable to Struts 2. Most of the components can be/are POJOs with standard annotations with out the need to extend or implement framework specific classes/interfaces. With Spring webflow building workflow type applications is straight forward. I'm not sure if Struts2 has anything similar.

Writing servlets for presentation layer is so 1999 but there are some apps that use servlets and filters for security and pre/post request processing infact Spring MVC and Struts Front controllers are servlets, likewise JDBC layer is replaced by ORM frameworks like Hibernate/iBatis etc.

Question (repeated since it probably got lost): what's the standard way to do SOAP & REST web-services in Java? Is there a 'the way' or does everyone use different 3rd-party stuff?

Webservices have evolved and changed since last JAX-RPC1.0. The latest release is JAX-WS 2.x (Sun's Metro is the reference implementation bundled with Java 1.6). It also inlcudes REST style web services. This is rapidly becoming 'standard way' now

Apache's Axis2 is another implementation of Webservices with its own model for SOAP and REST services but its latest release also includes JAX-WS implementation.

HTH

[realityhack]

J2EE had it's day?

In the banking world, some people consider this cutting edge. But then again, we still use COBOL in some systems.

[d000hg]

Hmm, I worked on a few biggish projects in the IB world which used servlets, JSP (& JSTL a bit). They were pretty clean and easy to understand.
I don't see why you need all these frameworks personally. Servlets intercept client requests and delegate to JSP, then DAOs or whatever encapsulate the DB stuff. The key thing is to minimise code in JSP and everything stays nice and tidy... I guess this kind of methodology is not that far from MVC but there was little overhead on new projects from not using a pre-existing framework. When we did a bit of Spring, it seemed the stuff Spring did for you saved less time than you spent wallowing in an ocean of XML configuration files.

Damn, now I'm derailing my own thread

[minestrone]

I thought struts was largely killed off by Spring, as not doing MVC very well? Or is v2 very different? Personally I don't really like the MVC thing too much but I thought Spring was the default choice and therefore something I need to keep current on.

Before struts got popular most JSP projects were a flippin nightmare, I actually still do quite a bit of work on old legacy JSP system where companies tried to write there own frameworks. As time moved the limitations of struts was noticed and it did not help when they added in crap like tiles.

It is largly hated in the community but people forget how revolutionary it was.

Struts2 came from another Action MVC project called webwork and they rebranded to struts 2, it is a complete rewrite.

I don't think Spring has really taken off on the front end.

[d000hg]

Question: What is the modern way to dynamically create HTML pages in a Java environment? I've only come across JSP/JSTL/JSF/raw servlets but all are being voted obsolete

Question (repeated since it probably got lost): what's the standard way to do SOAP & REST web-services in Java? Is there a 'the way' or does everyone use different 3rd-party stuff?

[d000hg]

I thought struts was largely killed off by Spring, as not doing MVC very well? Or is v2 very different? Personally I don't really like the MVC thing too much but I thought Spring was the default choice and therefore something I need to keep current on.

[minestrone]

I would say none, but I can't vote for that.

People are always saying "Oh, you don't need to know Servlets to do front and stuff" but if your JSP ain't working you sometimes need to look at the servlet to know what the hell is going on. I would not employ someone who did not know the servlet lifecycle if I wanted them to do a JSP gig.

I'm working on a greenfield Hibernate/Struts2/EJB3 project just now for a well know national company so Struts and EJB are still going strong. Struts 2 is by far the best MVC kicking about just now.

Off topic: Java will always be the strongest language, for the next decade at least, probably longer, it will always be pushed by IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, BEA, SAP which are far stronger than MS on it's own.

[d000hg]

Yes, I know they're not part of the J2EE spec... but they're used very widely so I included them.

Not really wanting to start a Java/.net/PHP debate here... anyone's welcome to start a new thread for that and I'd be interested to read it, but can we stay on-topic

[swamp]

Spring and Hibernate are not J2EE technologies. Nor is Struts.

Java as a whole has had its day. A very big day it had, but it's in its Autumn now. C# is looking better now.

[d000hg]

In a few threads I've seen some Java technologies take a pasting as obsolete/old-fashioned.

Off the top of my head, the list of most-used includes:

Servlets
JSP
JSTL
JSF
EJB3
Hibernate
Spring
Struts

Which are still widely used in new projects which don't have legacy issues? Or, which do you think should be used in new projects?

A side question... EJB3 allows you to auto-generate web-services from beans. If EJB's not in use, what APIs would normally be used for SOAP & REST-based services? One of the above, or maybe something in Apache libs?