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Sam Buchanan's weblog.

Appopriate use of J2EE.

May 16, 2003

Annraí O'Toole: The Problem with J2EE. "…while J2EE is great, it isn't the answer to every problem, specifically it is overkill as an infrastructure to deploy Web Services."

Jon Udell: Appropriate use of J2EE/EJB.

Not that this has anything to do with web services, but… A few weeks back I heard some rumbling about requiring that any CMS we use be J2EE compliant. This pissed me off for a couple days.

1. This criterion was being added by people who neither understand Java development nor are involved with any of the systems on which our web sites are deployed.
2. We're not a Java shop.
3. There's not a helluva lot of J2EE in the open source CMS world, obviously not in those written in languages other than Java. I'll resist any effort to needlessly exclude open source solutions at the outset.
4. Requiring J2EE is a vendor-driven idea. It seemed pretty clear that this was being suggested to play nicely with Oracle, who have a portal to sell us. Call me crazy, but I'm a sucker for choosing software that meets an organization's needs rather than a vendor's.
5. Isn't J2EE just a wee bit overkill?

Eventually I calmed down. We'll need some sort of interoperability, I reasoned, and as long as it's not set in stone as a requirement, J2EE might be useful. Too, it turns out that it's just a suggestion. But still. It should not surprise me, but it sure as hell bothers me, the way these ideas are just tossed around as if they're givens.