At this year's annual gathering of the tribe at JavaOne in San Francisco, Sun announced its intention to increase the number of Java developers from 3 million to 10 million. And how is Sun going to achieve this? By making Java easier. All I can say is, "hallelujah, Scott. Welcome to the party."
Hats off to Sun for 'fessing up to the dirty little secret that Java developers have been struggling with for the past few years: J2EE is too difficult.
J2EE, and WebSphere in particular, have been tremendous successes in defining a platform for enterprise development that is hardware and OS independent, highly scalable, and reliable. J2EE has taken many difficult things and made them possible. J2EE 1.5 defines some base-level language constructs and meta-information tags that will help. But for Java to be relevant in the face of Microsoft's push for .NET, it needs a next generation of tools that let you assemble applications visually from existing components and services. Different terms have emerged for this new type of tool, but whether you call it an integrated services environment (ISE) or just plain old-fashioned rapid application development (RAD) is not the big concern.
Job Security or Job Obscurity?
Most companies I meet with have a small number of J2EE gurus who really understand the guts of the platform. These are uber-architects who live and breathe this stuff. But for every architect, there are usually 10 Java application developers. Some are good at database code, others excel at user interfaces, and still others might be experts in defining EJBs. The problem with J2EE today is that you need to be an expert in just about everything and inevitably have to wade into a lot of low-level plumbing code that has nothing to do with the application itself.
Some purists might argue against Sun's efforts to simplify Java as "dumbing it down." After all, if you've figured out how to be a guru, then you may not like the idea of inviting a bunch of Visual Basic or 4GL programmers to the party.
In these days of "do more with less" IT budgets, many companies are reluctant to green-light projects that require more than six months of development, especially if it's going to take months before there's anything to see. For consultants trying to pitch clients, it's even worse. You usually need to show a working prototype - built on your own dime - to win the business. RAD tools for J2EE enable you to create a live, functional prototype that can be validated with users, managers, and the client before the heavy lifting is done. Rather than creating static screen shots and endless Visio diagrams, you can create a functional prototype that can evolve into a full-production Java application much more quickly. That way developers, analysts, and users are all on the same page and working together.
Of course, not all RAD tools are created equal. You should look for RAD tools that are standards-based, provide an abstraction model through visual representation of business processes, and still let you get down to the code when you need to.
