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20050810 Wednesday August 10, 2005

First Magazine Article: Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier It's official - I've written (and published) my first article in a magazine. If you received the July issue of Java Developer's Journal, you'll see my article titled Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier.

Over the course of its life, the J2EE Web Tier has faced many challenges in easing Web application development. While it's a scalable, enterprise-ready platform, it isn't exactly developer-friendly. Particular challenges to Web developers include the need for a standard Web framework, compatible expression languages, and availability of components. Several Web frameworks have been developed to resolve these issues, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. This article discusses the unique challenges of the J2EE Web Tier and how various technologies have attempted resolve them. By learning from and competing with each other, these Web technologies play an important role in pushing the limits of excellence to produce ever-higher standards of Web application development.

Enjoy! Posted in Java at Aug 10 2005, 04:30:22 PM MDT 11 Comments

Comments:

Congrats Matt!

Posted by Jacob Hookom on August 10, 2005 at 06:20 PM MDT #

Congratulations, getting published by Sys-Con is certainly a feat comparable to scaling Mount Everest without aid. ;-)

Posted by Anothermike on August 11, 2005 at 05:10 AM MDT #

I just finished the article, and it was very well written and informative. Thanks for that. I did find one error however. I attended the 2001 JavaOne conference, and I do recall a mention of JSF, in the context of the JCP. It was JSR 127. I don't recall much about it. I believe the speaker was Pat Sueltz. Your article kinda implies that it was first talked about in '02. I think it's significant because it has taken sooooooo long for this spec to mature. Time to market is my chief complaint about the JCP. Anyway, Cheers!

Posted by Matt on August 11, 2005 at 09:14 AM MDT #

Thanks for the tip Matt - I'll do some research, confirm your suggestion, and update the article if I'm wrong (which I certainly could be).

Posted by Matt Raible on August 11, 2005 at 11:54 AM MDT #

[Trackback] This is Matt Raible's VW Challenges in the J2EE Web Tier While Frameworks Driving Innovation ? Over the course of its life, the J2EE Web Tier has faced many challenges in easing Web application development. While it's a scalable, enterprise-ready...

Posted by Michael Levin's Weblog on August 11, 2005 at 08:30 PM MDT #

Matt - you are correct that JSF was announced at JavaOne 2001. Youch - 3 years to write a web framework, eh?! Another mistake I made in the article was saying "JSF 1.2 lets JSF use HTML Templates like Tapestry does". When I originally wrote the article in March, I thought this was going to happen but it didn't. The good news is you *can* use the open-source Facelets or Clay view technologies - which provide Tapestry-like templates.

Posted by Matt Raible on August 11, 2005 at 09:44 PM MDT #

Unfortunately I stopped reading JDJ a long time ago. I found that the quality of the journal declined and the articles there were more to promote a specific brand rather than discuss technology. Also their marketing spam mails got under my skin. I'll have to find some who has a copy to read this article.

Posted by Sanjiv Jivan on August 12, 2005 at 07:59 AM MDT #

"Youch - 3 years to write a web framework, eh?!"

JSF isn't a web framework - its a standard/specification - and thats never a quick process.

Posted by Niall on August 12, 2005 at 09:27 AM MDT #

Even when I first looked at JSF, I thought the framework was horribly bloated and hard to work with. But then I started using it. It's a great platform for development that offers you tons of flexability. I've written about JSF as a platform time and time again, but Matt does make a good point about it taking '3 years'. Even with the recent JEE 5 freeze, there are a lot of us that wished we could have pushed JSF much further with annotation support and generics, but it's going to have to wait until JSF 2.0 (which some of us are already playing around with possible features). So look for a major focus on ease of component development in the next release. Btw, the answer to the simple math question is: 95... just in case ;-)

Posted by Jacob Hookom on August 12, 2005 at 10:46 AM MDT #

Matt - Were you going to update that list/comparison of web frameworks you had floating around awhile back? Would be interseting to read with your new insight on JSF, additions to Spring, etc.

Posted by Paul on August 14, 2005 at 09:55 AM MDT #

Paul - you can find the PDF of my web frameworks presentation at http://equinox.dev.java.net/framework-comparison. I updated this presentation last month. Unfortunately, the presentation doesn't do the talk much justice - I believe it's better in person, particularly b/c I can answer audience members' questions.

You also might checkout my Java Web Frameworks Whitepaper. Just to warn you, it's written at a much higher-level and doesn't dive into much technical detail, if any.

Posted by Matt Raible on August 16, 2005 at 10:44 AM MDT #

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