alternatives to J2EE [LWN.net]

alternatives to J2EE

Posted Apr 17, 2007 15:01 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: alternatives to J2EE by man_ls
Parent article: Open source Mule takes the "donkey work" out of ESB (IT Manager's Journal)

Anyway, Mule is not a custom glue layer; it is a generic, highly configurable 200k lines Java package.

I'm sorry... it just seems wrong. You basically spend 200K lines of Java to get... a system you "program" using XML. All of your customization scripts end up being equivalent to little snippets of Perl glue, except they're XML and required re-invention of 200K lines of Java to interpret them.

(Log in to post comments)

alternatives to J2EE

Posted Apr 17, 2007 20:45 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

OK, I see your point. But see it from a different point of view: you already have the custom snippets of Perl glue all around, difficult to change or even know how many there are; essentially you have the same copy-pasted all around, so each time you change something in one place, it breaks in another. The resulting system is extremely brittle and unstable.

Now you can choose a program where from a single configuration file you can control almost all of your infrastructure; to change an endpoint or a transport you just have to change the file. Replacing your whole setup (programs, endpoints) with another one now looks almost doable, and probably is, with time and care.

It is all about manageability, and managers love that :D

alternatives to J2EE

Posted Apr 19, 2007 1:41 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

you already have the custom snippets of Perl glue all around, difficult to change or even know how many there are; essentially you have the same copy-pasted all around, so each time you change something in one place, it breaks in another. The resulting system is extremely brittle and unstable.

Ummm... speak for yourself. I have properly-written Perl modules with actual POD documentation, all in logically-organized SVN repositories. Just because you can write crappy Perl doesn't mean you have to.

An undisciplined sysadmin will screw up MULE configuration just as surely as he/she will screw up scripting, and a disciplined one will probably do well with both systems.