I've been attending the JEE Summit in Berlin to update my Java EE knowledge that was still more than 5 years old and based on J2EE (1.4) standard. A technology very hard to handle - but things have changed....
Since that time - in the recent 5 years - I was lucky to support two projects that were based on Eclipse RCP and a Spring stack executed in a WAR on Tomcat. We used the Spring framwork for security, remoting, transaction, testing, and so forth...
All speakers at the summit had proved that the JEE technology stack is ready for productive use. Mostly impressed I was from the potential the CDI-technology seems to offer by eliminating the need for implementation of many of the Gang Of Four patterns.
This leads to a few questions that needs to be clarified:
- How does the 'new' JEE 'feel' in every day life of a software developer who is used to the Spring framwork?
- Is it possible to use JEE Web Profile (e.g. based on Tomcat/TomEE) as backend/server of a rich client architecture (by replacing the spring stack) or do we need a full JEE container for our needs?
The overall technology view (from 10.000 meters):
Client
- Eclipse RCP
- JEE Web Profile (EJB/CDI, Transaction, Security, JPA)
I'm sure many other frameworks/technologies/APIs/tools will be emerged and discussed when the project proceeds.
