Someone else in Java EE 6 pain

I'm not alone!

Harald Wellmann writes about his experience moving a Tomcat-based app to Glassfish, JBoss AS 6, and Resin. Warts and all.

I think Java EE 6 really needs more real-world attitude and less hype. More bug fixing and more spec tidying, less focus on the next whizz-bang feature. It's nice to see somebody else who's had similarly painful experiences with it. Perhaps I'm not stupid after all, I simply make the foolish mistake of expecting released software like Glassfish 3.0.1 to have most features fairly solid.

Harald also notes that CDI was a huge problem with Java EE 6 until quite recently, largely because Glassfish 3.0 was half-baked and under-tested; JPA 2.0 is prone to exciting implementation differences and bugs, and more.

My favourite quote:

Legacy

Backward compatibility is a good thing for veteran users of a framework. Users don't want to change all of their application code just for upgrading to a new framework version.

On the other hand, backward compatibility can be extremely confusing to new users: There's two or three solutions for the same kind of problem, the legacy one is not marked as legacy or deprecated clearly enough, tutorials and example code still use the old style, and you can only resort to your favourite search engine or to trial and error to make things work consistently.

(Emphasis mine)

That's a perfect description of some of the problems I encountered when trying to get a handle on the released standard Java EE 6 and Glassfish 3.0, which I foolishly assumed was a stable platform to build my app on as I moved into the Java EE world

Java EE 7 really needs to modularize the backward compatibility crap into separate archives so that apps can depend on either javaee-7 or javaee-7-legacy as appropriate. That way we'll finally be free of the two copies of the obsolete-before-release @ManagedBean annotation and all the other horrible legacy crap.