am i a java luddite

I’ve been programming in Java since sometime in 1997, and in all this time I have never embraced certain, now ubiquitous seeming, Java technologies. Mainly I’m thinking about the whole J2EE thing. Partly this is because I haven’t paid much attention to this (huge) development in Java. Partly this is because in 1998 or ‘99 I remember reacting very strongly to an attempt to convert my employer’s entire back office to J2EE. Back then, I was reacting against doing engineering for engineering’s sake. I had no patience for computer science projects, which is what a J2EE conversion looked like to me. As I researched what EJB’s (the primary J2EE thingamajig back then) would give us that we didn’t already have, the only thing I could find was distributed transactions. I’m sure that there a few businesses that need distributed transactions, but I think that they are few and far between, and for certain we weren’t one of them. I didn’t have decision making power back then (and still don’t, for that matter), but I manage to write a convincing email. The J2EE conversion project never happened. Since then, JSP was invented (and reinvented), JBOSS was released, J2EE seemingly took over. I’ve never like JSPs. I’ve like the concept of JSP, but not the actual execution. I haven’t looked at JavaServer Faces. I’ve been using Velocity for this task – very simple, very easy. In general, I’ve been sticking to J2SE and Apache Jakarta stuff. Does this make me a Java Luddite?