Thursday, March 16, 2017
No more J2EE webapps
No more J2EE webapps
I got my start in my programming career over 7 years ago developing web applications as part of the intranet group for a Fortune 500 company. The group was switching from developing in Haht (I believe back then it was some type of vbscript) to Java (JSPs and Servlets). I joined the group at the moment they switched to Weblogic 5.1, JDK 1.3, and Oracle 8i (I think). It was a fast paced environment as we cranked out one internal application after another. Of course back then I wasnt the best web developer, but by the time I left I felt pretty confident in being able to hold my own (but humble at the same time).
One thing that always stayed the same throughout creating each one of those applications was the ability to rapidly develop them. What do I mean by rapidly develop? To me this means making a change and being able to switch to my browser and verify that change and repeating that hundreds of times a day.
That is how things were when I moved on 5 years later: (change + save + refresh) x 100s. Now it has been around 2 years since I have developed a real web application and for some reason that process has disappeared. For some reason my fellow J2EE developers have come to accept the process of rebuilding and hot deploying or even restarting the application server FOR EVERY CHANGE! Thousands or even millions of minutes are lost everyday by J2EE developers out there producing software like this. And to that I say, not good enough.
Maybe I am missing something; if so please enlighten me by commenting to this post. Take the JBoss Application Server (AS) 4.2.1 for example. I have tried finding better ways to deploy a WAR (exploded or bundled) on JBoss with no luck. The best I can come up with is increasing the JVMs PermSpace for better hot deployment (article), but I am still left with having to rebuild the WAR and copying it over. And sooner or later I have to restart the server. What a waste.
At one time there use to be a really slick maven 1 tomcat plugin made by codeczar.com that supported the ability to tell tomcat where your webapp was, preventing you from having to rebuild and redeploy. It was a huge time saver, but unfortunately this plugin is no longer supported (see here). If you are curious you can still get this plugin here thanks to Google Cache. The documentation has also been copied here.
Where does that leave me? Any language that lets me develop at a fast rate. Even if I lose tons of reusable components. I would imagine the time I save not rebuilding/redeploying more than makes up for reusable components and other goodies J2EE offers. In fact that has been the main reason for my personal quest to learn Grails and Rails. To me these languages offer the ability to deliver faster and cheaper and I believe this article supports that. If I had to start a new web project I would definitely look long and hard at either Grails or Rails.
Available link for download
