The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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The SquizLogKeith Pitty takes a squiz at the world. |
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Via the ACM TechNews this morning I see that enthusiasm for Rails is spreading. The linked article, entitled A Ruby amid computer programming diamonds, reports that:
"Ruby on Rails is swiftly becoming the tool of choice for many promising web application developers, not to mention certain college professors."
Having played with Rails for some time now I understand and share the enthusiasm.
On the other hand, back in the Java EE world, I have also recently started to explore Seam.
To me, both Rails and Seam deserve recognition as elegant web application frameworks. The primary proponents of each of these technologies, David Heinemeier Hansson and Gavin King respectively, are both undeniably opinionated. I'd love to hear a debate between the two, moderated of course by a calm neutral third party!
Why not use Stateful Session Beans to manage web application state?
It's a question that I've pondered from time to time. I remember vague warnings not to use SFSBs due to poor performance but never really got to the bottom of the issue. And over the last few years there has been a reaction against EJB 2.1 in general (e.g. in the Spring community). In my own case the system that I've been working on for the last year or so has been deployed in Tomcat so EJBs have been out of the picture.
More recently I have been encouraged by the emergence of EJB 3. Earlier this year when I heard Rima Patel from Sun speak about EJB 3 and recalled my own painful experiences developing with EJBs I could understand her excitement. EJB3 appears to make everything so much simpler.
In the last few days I have been learning about how Seam unifies the JSF 1.2 and EJB 3 component models, emphasising the use of Stateful Session Beans bound directly into JSF views. Seam certainly looks worth exploring, not least because it "provides multiple stateful contexts of different granularity from the conversation scope to the business process scope, liberating developers from the limitation of HTTP sessions".
And then today InfoQ alerted me to Rod Coffin's article in which he compares Spring and EJB 3.0, noting that the main difference was in the way they managed state. As he pointed out, Spring's use of prototype beans to manage state involves more work to achieve the equivalent of stateful session beans. So now that EJB 3.0 has simplified development of EJBs, why not use SFSBs? At the very least it would make sense to me to experiment with them using JBoss Application Server or GlassFish.
And what of that supposed performance problem with SFSBs? It would seem to be a myth that was dispelled nearly four years ago!
Me: "You should have seen my putt on the 14th yesterday!"
My son: "What about my putt there last week? And what about my putt on the last?"
My daughter: "What about my jumping on Mate (ed: that's the name of the horse) yesterday?"
Me: "That's great, mate!"
My wife: "Well, you should have seen me hanging out the washing today!!!"