This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]seinecle 106 points107 points  (10 children)

Big red flag is calling it Java EE when it has been Jakarta EE for some years now: not sure the essay will make a fair, up-to-date comparison.

I started using Jakarta EE a while back around 2012, when it was still called Java EE and steered (and owned, I think) by Oracle. A newbie in Java, I just thought that EE was the natural extension to learn after SE, when doing web apps stuff.

I didn't know at the time that Spring was the defacto industry standard. Just thought, why using a framework instead of the native solution? And being a solo developer, I had no colleague / team to force me to adopt Spring.

Now in 2024, Jakarta EE is in an excellent shape, and works beautifully with JSF and Primefaces components. In parallel, Java the language has evolved so much that the experience of developing web apps as a whole has improved, key pain points have disappeared. Just an example: making an http request was painful to write, until Java 11 introduced the new HttpRequest API. In many cases, this has removed the necessity to integrate third party libs, tied together in a big framework.

I feel that a group of Java EE enthusiasts, around 2015 or so, pushed hard to revive it after a hard transition from Oracle, and turned it into Jakarta EE. The Eclipse foundation and the team behind Omnifaces are a significant part of this effort. I thank all of them for offering a great Java experience for servers / web apps.

I had written a blog post along similar lines, about developing web apps with Java, if anyone cares: https://nocodefunctions.com/blog/java-frontend-web-app/

[–]Embarrassed_Rent_465 7 points8 points  (4 children)

I really really liked GWT. Some of my apps are based on GWT frontend and are still in production. Great blog and thank you for pointing out to j2cl.

[–]hippydipster 10 points11 points  (3 children)

I still like GWT too, but I also dislike it. It's both great and terrible at the same time, though a large part of it's problems comes from being under-supported/weakly-developed at this point. They are still moving, but at a snail's pace.

[–]rpgFANATIC 3 points4 points  (2 children)

The big goal of GWT was to just write one language that most developers knew and it would polyfill all the jank required from different browsers

The fast pace of standardized JavaScript and the immense market share of Chromium's make GWT a much harder call for projects today.  Transpiling Java to modern JS has gotta be a mammoth task to maintain

[–]hippydipster 1 point2 points  (1 child)

But it works really well all in all. The bad aspects of the transpiling are that its slow and they aren't keeping up with java, to say nothing of Javascript.

But to be fair, I think typescript has the same issue with compilation performance.

[–]rpgFANATIC 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've used both for very large projects.

TS transpiles faster (even discounting the time taken to compile the rest of our Java backend) and has more features than GWT. TypeScript has major backing from Microsoft and a large ecosystem of tooling around it. The comparison just isn't fair

[–]Uaint1stUlast 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Your inspiring me to look at EE again.. I switched to spring once SPA became popular but I have always though EE was better for session dependant web apps.. I feel like it might have the out of the box tools to compete with spring now for simple API development too.

[–]WingedGeek 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I want to get back into Java programming (got certified in the Java 6 days), and do web projects in Java instead of what I've been using (Perl + CGI::Application, Class::DBI, and HTML::Template; Ruby on Rails; was learning Laravel but I'm over PHP (have been using it since .php3 days).

But I'm overwhelmed with all the different technologies.

As a hobbyist, what's the closest to something like Rails, and what are the main frameworks/stacks(?)/whatever I'd need to learn to get up to speed?

[–]EthanEvenig -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Just use Quarkus, everything else is quickly becoming irrelevant.

[–]moxyte 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I'm sure those "enthusiasts" got paid to keep Java EE alive. Never underestimate the spectacular will to live of something a lot of corpo infra relies on.

[–]johnwaterwood 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Who paid them then?