A colleague sent along a note about how Dave Rosenberg feels that Sun Doesn’t Respect Java. As I noted in a post from yesterday, I think there are some things to like about JAX-RS.  But as a decent JEE architect, I have some thoughts on whether Java actually is exciting anymore.

  1. Has Java gotten boring?  If you’re a web developer, Java has always been like 6AM – too early to really be interesting, too late to convince you to go back to sleep;
  2. Java’s middle tier absolutely blows anything else out of the water.  I like LINQ, but comparables like ActiveRecord for RoR or PHPYii simply can’t do the things that JPA can do;
  3. IoC/DI in Java, open source or JEE, is still better than anything anyone is doing today – Castle included.

Dave points out that the “write-once, run anywhere” paradigm may have lost out to virtualization.  Call me when virtualization is native to all of the major OS’s, Dave.  Until then, the JVM is still the closest thing we have to a platform independent environment.

I’ve looked at the EE6 spec, and he’s right though.  Omitting things like Web Beans is certainly a disappointment.  The fact that we still don’t have great native dependency injection in the EE platform leaves us always falling back upon Spring.  All of these things are rather frustrating.

JavaFX – just terrible.  Adobe did it right with AIR, even if adoption is seemingly limited to hundreds of Twitter clients.

If Sun wants to start pushing the envelope instead of follwoing the leader – how about embracing a cloud computing platform through JEE?  JAX-RS is promising, but why not unify the JAX-WS and JAX-RS spec to provide a single platform for all web-based SOA?  At the very least, that would put them on par with WCF.