Spring and JEE

A helpful article I found on the value add of Spring...

Why do J2EE applications need Spring? The core of Spring explained...

It says most of the things I would say and doesn't "get ahead of itself".

I would strongly agree with points 1 and 2. Point 3, though it is a feature, is not something that I think, is used as much as people think. The reason I say that is how often do you actually have two implementations of the same interface, and switch between them? In our application we have loads of DAO objects, loads of service interfaces and yet we without fail have a one to one mapping between the interface and its implementation. The interfaces, IMO are useless fuzz. What I would prefer in fact would be for them all to be accessed directly (no interface) and then if and interface is required, then I can quickly and easily with the tools we have today, extract an interface and it's now abstracted. I only have the fuzz where it is absolutely necessary.

Though I must admit that we do use this feature and it does add value. I just don't think it is is the killer feature of the Spring Framework.

One of these days I think I should write a "why I like Spring Article..."

JEE take up could be better...

I work on a fairly large Jave Enterprise Edition application, deployed onto Websphere. The company is a large corporate and the application is a publicly available web site, involving a .net front end, java back end and a database.

The application runs on websphere and is deployed by a team of people who manage the server environment. There are lots of similar applications which they manage.

We have our own "dev" application servers - these are little more than developer spec boxes running linux. They are used for basic testing and to validate the application before it gets promoted. And, because we manage these environments, have carte blanche access.

The amazing thing is that the application always works just fine in this environment, but when promoted, it suddenly no longer works. And it is no coincidence that the application does not work in environments we have no access to.

Now, when the application does not work, we get blamed. The onus always falls on us, the developers to fix the problem even though we have little to no access to their environments the application is deployed on. The fact that the applications work in the environments we do manage means that the problem lies in the fact that we cannot configure these environments ourselves.

What does this cause?

It causes us developers to build our applications in such a way as they have as little depedency as possible on the environment they're running in. Thus we use as little of the JEE spec as possible because those are the bits that need to be configured on the running application server.

I am convinced that if we had better access to the test servers, we would be more inclined to use the rich functionality provided by the JEE specification.