All entries for Tuesday 23 August 2005

Release once every half hour

Writing about web page http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/06/cal_henderson_on_how_we_built_flickr.shtml

…Cal revealed that on 'good days', Flickr releases a new version every half an hour…

{gasp}. And I thought we were doing well with our once-every-two-weeks cycle times…

Chris May : 23 Aug 2005 15:00 |  Tags: Dev Flickr Web |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

EJB 3.0: What's in it for me?

Writing about web page http://houseofhaug.net/blog/archives/2005/08/12/hibernate-hates-spring/trackback/

There's an interesting discussion here about the relationship between Spring, Hibernate, and the forthcoming EJB 3.0 spec. In summary (AIUI):

• Hibernate removed the references to Spring from their wiki
• Scott blogged about this, with the rather provocative title 'Hibernate Hates Spring'
• Gavin King commented, asserting that Spring's hibernate support doesn't add any value to a hibernate 3 application, and that moreover there are personal differences between the two teams. He goes on to claim that using an EJB3 container (such as JBoss's embeddable one) provides a better solution to transaction demarcation, exception handling, and session provisioning than the Spring offering.
• Jurgen Hoeller observed that Spring already supports hibernate's native session provisioning as an alternative to the old-style HibernateTemplate, and allows it to work outside of an EJB environment
• Bill Burke (in a much more reasonned and mellow style than in days of old!) weighs in to note that JBoss doesn't consider itself as a competitor to Spring, though he does think that some of spring's integration code isn't really adding value.

It's an interesting read. But what it made me think about is: What is EJB 3 going to offer me, that Spring currently doesn't ?

Firstly, there's the persistence standardisation (JSR220) which might be nice. Actually I'm pretty content with Hibernate right now, but it looks like a short jump to make to go with the standard. But what about the other stuff? I'll admit right now I haven't read the spec, but my understanding is that it'll provide basically all the same stuff as EJB2, but without the cruft

• declarative transaction demarcation
• some IOC / object provisioning
• a bunch of distributed stuff that I don't care about :-)

Now, the burning question is, why would I want to pick up a new technology for that? Clearly it's not going to replace all of the functionality I currently get from Spring, so my options are {Spring}, or {EJB3+Spring}, or {EJB3 + some other MVC + some other collection of utility libraries + more hand-written stuff}.

What will EJB3 give me that Spring won't? Right now, the only answer I'm seeing is 'standards-compliance'. Which seems like a relatively small benefit for picking up a shedload of new technology.

I think I need to go and find out what else it might be offering, just in case there's something I've missed.

Chris May : 23 Aug 2005 09:40 |  Tags: Ejb Hibernate Java Spring |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem