Better Faster Lighter Java [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

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Better Faster Lighter Java [Electronic resources] - نسخه متنی

Justin Gehtland; Bruce A. Tate

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Preface


In 2001, I was with Steve Daniel, a respected kayaker. We were at
Bull Creek after torrential rains, staring at the rapid that we later
named Bores. The left side of the rapid had water, but we wanted no
part of it. We were here to run the V, a violent six-foot drop with
undercut ledges on the right, a potential keeper hydraulic on the
left, and a boiling tower of foam seven feet high in the middle. I
didn't see a clean route. Steve favored staying
right and cranking hard to the left after the drop to avoid the
undercut ledge. I was leaning left, where I'd have a
tricky setup, and where it would be tough to identify my line, but I
felt that I could find it and jump over the hydraulic after making a
dicey move at the top. We both dismissed the line in the middle.
Neither of us thought we could keep our boats upright after running
the drop and hitting the tower, which we called a haystack because of
its shape. Neither of us was happy with our intended line, so we
stood there and stared.

Then a funny thing happened. A little boy, maybe 11 years old, came
over with a $10 inflatable raft. He shoved it into the main current,
and without paddle, life jacket, helmet, or any skill whatsoever, he
jumped right in. He showed absolutely no fear. The stream predictably
took him where most of the water was going, right into the
"tower of power." The horizontal
force of the water shot him through before the tower could budge him
an inch. We both laughed hysterically. He should have been dead, but
he made itusing an approach that more experienced kayakers
would never have considered. We had our line.

In 2004, I went with 60 kids to Mexico to build houses for the poor.
I'd done light construction of this kind before, and
we'd always used portable cement mixers to do the
foundation work. This group preferred another method.
They'd pour all of the ingredients on the
groundcement, gravel, and sand. We'd mix up
the piles with shovels, shape it like a volcano, and then pour water
in the middle. The water would soak in, and we'd
stir it up some more, and then shovel the fresh cement where we
wanted it. The work was utterly exhausting. I later told the project
director that he needed cement mixers; they would have saved a lot of
backbreaking effort.

He asked me how to maintain the mixers. I didn't
know. He asked where he might store them. I couldn't
tell him. He then asked how he might transport them to the sites,
because most groups tended to bring vans and not pickup trucks. I
finally got the picture. He didn't use cement mixers
because they were not the right tool for the job for remote sites in
Mexico. They might save a half a day of construction effort, but they
added just as much or more work to spare us that
effort. The tradeoff, once fully understood, not only failed on a
pure cost basis, but wouldn't work at all given the
available resources.

In 2003, I worked with an IT department to simplify their design.
They used a multilayered EJB architecture because they believed that
it would give them better scalability and protect their database
integrity through sophisticated transactions. After much
deliberation, we went from five logical tiers to two, completely
removed the EJB session and entity beans, and deployed on Tomcat
rather than Web Logic or JBoss. The new architecture was simpler,
faster, and much more reliable.

It never ceases to amaze me how often the simplest answer turns out
to be the best one. If you're like the average J2EE
developer, you probably think you could use a little dose of
simplicity about now. Java complexity is growing far beyond our
capability to comprehend. XML is becoming much more sophisticated,
and being pressed into service where simple parsed text would easily
suffice. The EJB architecture is everywhere, whether
it's warranted or not. Web services have grown from
a simple idea and three major APIs to a mass of complex, overdone
standards. I fear that they may also be forced into the mainstream. I
call this tendency "the bloat."

Further, so many of us are trained to look for solutions that match
our predetermined complicated notions that we don't
recognize simple solutions unless they hit us in the face. As we
stare down into the creek at the simple database problem, it
becomes a blob of EJB. The interfaces
become web services. This transformation happens
to different developers at different times, but most enterprise
developers eventually succumb. The solutions you see match the
techniques you've learned, even if
they're inappropriate; you've been
trained to look beyond the simple solutions that are staring you in
the face.

Java is in a dangerous place right now, because the real drivers, big
vendors like Sun, BEA, Oracle, and IBM, are all motivated to build
layer upon layer of sophisticated abstractions, to keep raising the
bar and stay one step ahead of the competition. It's
not enough to sell a plain servlet container anymore. Tomcat is
already filling that niche. Many fear that JBoss will fill a similar
role as a J2EE application server killer. So, the big boys innovate
and build more complex, feature-rich servers. That's
goodif the servers also deliver value that we, the customers,
can leverage.

More and more, though, customers can't keep up. The
new stuff is too hard. It forces us to know too much. A typical J2EE
developer has to understand relational databases, the Java
programming languages, EJB abstractions, JNDI for services, JTA for
transactions, JCA and data sources for connection management, XML for
data representation, Struts for abstracting user interface MVC
designs, and so on. Then, she's got to learn a whole
set of design patterns to work around holes in the J2EE
specification. To make things worse, she needs to keep an eye on the
future and at least keep tabs on emerging technologies like Java
Server Faces and web services that could explode at any moment.

To top it off, it appears that we are approaching an event horizon of
sorts, where programmers are going to spend more time writing code to
support their chosen frameworks than to solve their actual problems.
It's just like with the cement mixers in Mexico: is
it worth it to save yourself from spending time writing database
transactions if you have to spend 50% of your time writing code
supporting CMP?

Development processes as we know them are also growing out of
control. No human with a traditional application budget can
concentrate on delivering beautiful object interaction diagrams,
class diagrams, and sophisticated use cases and still have enough
time to create working code. We spend as much or more time on a
project on artifacts that will never affect the
program's performance, reliability, or stability. As
requirements inevitably change due to increasing competitive
pressures, these artifacts must also change, and we find that rather
than aiding us, these artifacts turn into a ball, tied to a rope,
with the other end forming an ever-tightening noose around our necks.
There's a better way.

A few independent developers are trying to rethink enterprise
development, and building tools that are more appropriate for the
job. Gavin King, creator of Hibernate, is building a persistence
framework that does its job with a minimal API and gets out of the
way. Rod Johnson, creator of Spring, is building a container
that's not invasive or heavy or complicated. They
are not attempting to build on the increasingly precarious J2EE
stack. They're digging through the muck to find a
more solid foundation. In short, I'm not trying to
start a revolution. It's already started.

That's the subject of this book. I recommend that we
re-imagine what J2EE could and should be, and move back down to a
base where we can apply real understanding and basic principles to
build simpler applications. If you're staring at the
rapids, looking at solutions you've been taught will
workbut you still don't quite see how to get
from point A to point B without real painit's
time to rethink what you're doing.
It's time to get beyond the orthodox approaches to
software development and focus on making complex tasks simple. If you
embrace the fundamental philosophies in this book,
you'll spend more time on what's
important. You'll build simpler solutions. When
you're done, you'll find that your
Java is better, faster, and lighter.


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