Which technology stack?

Thread view:

Casper - 26 Jul 2006 20:57 GMT

For rather massive intranet/extranet database driven applications, a
good technology stack is needed. At first, it seemed like a great asset
to be able to do everything declaredly from within one all-knowing IDE,
which is possible from JDeveloper. Our current BC/ADF/Struts/UIX stack
has scaled well for the first year or so, but as deep refactorings were
needed and the technologies evolve, we are starting to feel trapped:

- Projects are so deeply intertwined that only the project manager knows
about the dependencies and mutual boundaries.
- There are 1000+ XML files to be kept in sync with the Java code which
causes lack of transparency (black-box syndrome) and slow working tools.
- Migration tools from old to new technologies are next to worthless.

If my criteria’s are ease-of-use, transparency, project
separation/independence and likelyhood of long-term (~10 years) support,
which Java technologies would you guys recommend? I’ve heard that EJB3
is a great simplification over previous EJB2’s and also that Hibernate
seems to dominate the ORM world. Also, it seems as though JSF is the way
to go, but which implementation and what IDE?!

I realize there is probably not a single answer to this, but in any case
I would appreciate some feedback from peers in the same boat.

Thanks in advance,
Casper

Reply to this Message

Paul - 27 Jul 2006 00:52 GMT

I'm currently a fan of Struts/Spring/Hibernate.
Some issues though. The learning curve for the team using Spring was
definitely non-trivial. However, now that the team is over it, the code
base is very flexible, easy to maintain, and easy to refactor. I admit
to starting off by cursing it and now sing the praises.
Hibernate is not perfect but, it does have some good features. It will
work better with code that is written well. Whether or not to use it
depends on the queries you use.
Struts is good if you don't use everything. No tiles, no validation
framework.

In my current project, we use EJB's (not for persistence) and MDB's as
(very) thin wrappers around the classes that do the real work. They
also implement the same interfaces as the real business classes. Then
using Spring, its trivial to swap back and forth from EJB to POJO with
a configuration change (Spring is configured to return an
implementation of the business interface). The code never knows if it
gets the EJB wrapper or the real class.

I'm not yet convinced that JSF is ready for a large scale application
but, I'm hopeful an implementation will be soon.

Reply to this Message

gevatron@yahoo.com - 27 Jul 2006 19:17 GMT

If you are looking for a JSF/EJB 3.0 combination you can use JDeveloper
10.1.3 to get the same visual development approach you had before.
You can use the ADF Model layer to easily bind your JSF to your EJBs.
And the new documentation that is offered on the ADF Framework will
help you figure out what the XML files are and how to change them.

The ADF Faces set of JSF component will give you the equivalent to UIX.

Reply to this Message

Casper - 27 Jul 2006 20:46 GMT

Thanks but Oracle creates too IDE/propritary-dependent solutions without
much support and has proved to not care much about a solid migration
path for existing customers. I'd rather stick to a truely open solution
that does not lock me down and which has a large community.

Casper

> If you are looking for a JSF/EJB 3.0 combination you can use JDeveloper
> 10.1.3 to get the same visual development approach you had before.
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
>
> The ADF Faces set of JSF component will give you the equivalent to UIX.

Reply to this Message

Which technology stack?

Free Magazines