Reading an article I remembered the words of one of my friends (Doru Girba) about the increasing complexity of Java, the language and technologies. And I must agree with him: EJB it's a nightmare (at least version 2), Java enterprise application start to add more and more complicated technologies, which add more complexity rather than to simplify things. I start to feel all this complexity myself, being involved in a massive enterprise project.
But there is also hope for better. Spring (a JEE application framework) simplified a lot the JEE landscape; it heavily influenced EJB version 3 with it's innovative ideas.
Another good sign is the development of more and more dynamic languages that run on JVM. The most promising (from my point of view) is Groovy: a dynamic version of Java (dynamic typing, closures, MOP, and others). Groovy also provides and web framework, inspired by the famous RoR, called Grails. Groovy's advantage over other dynamic languages is that it is compiled into Java bytecode, so it looks live ordinary Java classes.
Coming back to the article I mentioned in the beginning, it's about the recent acquisition of the company that develops Groovy and Grails by SpringSource (the company that develops Spring framework) - "More Weapons for the War on Complexity: SpringSource Acquires Groovy/Grails Leader". A combination of Spring and Groovy and Grails, running on a light-weight application server, based on OSGI, looks like a very promising idea. And the most interesting is the new SpringSource motto: "Weapons for the War on Java Complexity."
Conclusion: Keep it simple! Do not complicated things more than it has to be.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein
"Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
