Summary
"Is it really possible to write a quick and dirty web application with EJB3/JSF in a couple of days? What works well and what doesn't?" In a recent blog post, Cay Horstmann set out to answer those questions in the course of developing a simple, but practical, Web app.
Advertisement
EJB 3 and JSF are both frameworks with the goal of making developing Web applications easier. To fill a practical need—that of creating a questionnaire—Cay Horstman set out to write a simple Web app using these technologies, as well as the NetBeans IDE.
In his recent blog entry, The Power and Pain of POJOs, Horstmann recounts both the good, the bad, and the ugly in his experience.
After three days of coding, Horstmann had a working solution, concluding that,
In the past, EJB was far too complicated for rapid development. It only made sense for "big iron" apps. But EJB3 is different. A competent developer (Elvis, not Einstein) can use it to put together a simple app quickly. The tools could be better (error handling, visual editing, JSF components), but Netbeans is reasonable and gives you one-stop shopping.
Horstmann was mostly satisfied with EJB 3 and JSF's ease of use, as well as NetBean's ability to debug code written for the Java EE 5 platform. However, he did have issues with a missing collections feature in EJB 3—something that Hibernate's API provides, for instance—as well as a relative difficulty of debugging while using the GlassFish app server.
What are your EJB3 and JSF experiences, especially when using these technologies together?
3 Days? And the conclusion is that it was a useful tool and improved productivity when developing a trivial web app?
That app could have been done in any lighter weight framework in a couple of hours. In a really solid framework like Seaside, I reckon I could get it done in an hour or less.
Horstmann's experience is the best condemnation of the boat anchor that is EJB I have seen.
Previous Topic
