The Biggest Loser's Next Contestant: Java Bloatware
If the tech community were to host their own version of the popular TV show The Biggest Loser (or maybe Celebrity Fit Club) you would see enterprise Java front and center---bloated, overweight, tired, and drained.
The future of enterprise Java is becoming clear. The morbidly obese legacy platforms are in decline, with leaner solutions increasingly used in production as well as in development. Legacy technologies such as EJB are becoming less and less relevant.The lukewarm takeup of Java EE 5 leaves it looking increasingly like the last gasp of traditional J2EE bloatware. Meanwhile, the Java EE 6 specification is finally set to allow for greater modularity, in a radical change which will have important implications for developers and is likely to rejuvenate competition among implementations. As the standards and the products based upon them have gathered pound after pound of cellulite, SOA, Web 2.0 and other infrastructural changes continually impose new requirements that were not foreseen…