EJB revisited

Due to a university course I had to use EJBs with JBoss 3 (using Xdoclets) last year. I hated it: slow, undocumented and from times to times (okay, admit it: most of the times) just not working.

I didn’t learn and now I’ve enlisted to do a similar exercise using the newer JBoss 4. What (hasn’t) changed in the last year:

• Due to JSR-181 (and Java5) you can now use Java Annotations instead of Xdoclet Pseudo-Annotations. This helps debugging your code (also it looks way better) but still it’s a long way from simplicity. It still sucks big time.
• We had a new problem as we tried to run JBoss on Windows. Accessing the Beans just didn’t work while a virgin install on Linux just did the right thing. Java runs everywhere.. right, but your mileage may vary.
• There’s still the old java “where are all my JARs and which versions of a JAR and which java runtime version do i need” problems. We lost some days before we found out that some libraries just don’t work with a given java version (very, very bad backtraces/exceptions on the server console).
• The documentation is still crap. While there are lots of small (often non-working) examples on the web there’s no comprehensive and (works-for-sure) guide out there.
• The infrastructure costs are still high. A running JBoss 4.0 server including a HSQL database and without deployed user beans consumes around 700MB of virtual memory with a RSS of 130MB. Why?
• Most deployment problems vanished as we are using the supplied (and preconfigured) Eclipse JBoss designer – which of course still sucks more free memory out of my system. But the “building those ear/war files by hand” (as the ant target didn’t work) problems have disappeared.
• Same dosage of nerve breakdowns, but with better music this time..

So, did I see the glory of the new EJB ways? No. Would I use them? Hell, no. Would I like to burn everyone responsible for the sorry state of JBoss documentation? For sure. And did RedHat’s commercial overtake of JBoss increase my respect for RedHat: hardly.

To summarize: EJB is crap. JBoss sucks. Thank you for your attention.
Same old story, still feeling dirty after touching that stuff. I’m quite calm normally, but I need to sing the following song.

Corrupt, you corrupt,
Bring corruption to all that you touch.

Hold, you’ll behold,
And behold and for all that you’ve done.

And Spell, cast a spell,
Cast a spell on the country you run.

And risk, you will risk,
You will risk all their lives and their souls.

And burn, you will burn,
You will burn in hell, yeah you’ll burn in hell.
You’ll burn in hell, yeah you’ll burn in hell for your sins.

Muse – Take a Bow

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