How to improve productivity when developing Java EE based web applications

Question

I'd like to know how you address the seemingly low productivity of Java EE-based web application development compared to other technology stacks (Seaside, Ruby on Rails, etc).

The constraints are:

• The finished web application must be deployable on Java EE compliant application containers
• If possible, previous investment in Java-based solution should be preserved, i.e. native interoperability with Java-based systems and libraries should be possible
• Due to team structure, Java as implementation language is preferred, although less exotic JVM-based languages (i.e. Groovy) might be acceptable as well
• The resulting system needs to be architecturally sound
• The resulting system needs to be extensible and maintainable

To not let this dwindle into a philosophical discussion, I'm only interested in suggestions that are based on practical experience. Possible examples include domain specific languages, frameworks and MDSD.

If you point to an abstract class of solutions (like MDA / MDSD), please provide details on how you implemented it as well as information about common pitfalls and best practices.

If you disagree on the assumption that Java EE-based web application development implies inferior productivity, I'd like to hear your reasoning as well.

EDIT: As there are a lot less answers than I expected, I'll accept accounts of abortive attempts as well, basically extending the question to "How (not) to improve productivity when developing Java EE based web applications?".

Answer 1

I believe the Java EE Java stack is actually very good. There are a few reasons explaining the low productivity of Java EE:

• Being “the enterprise stack”, it is often used to create boring, ugly, “good enough” applications and, in general, enterprises tend not to attract great developers who love programming, and think and care about what they do. The quality of software in the enterprise world is not great.
• Being the enterprise stack where the money is, software vendors try to sell something to them. They create huge, complex and expensive solutions not because they are good, but simply because they could sell them to enterprises.
• Enterprises are often very risk averse and everything they do better be “standardized”. Standards are created either after some technology proved to be successful or before. In both cases, it’s bad for enterprises (and Java). Enterprises end up using either good technology too late or a downright failed technology. The latter case is also very dangerous because it creates a false perception that a technology (otherwise a complete failure) must be good if it is standardized and everyone is using it.
• Historically, Java EE platform seemed to have attracted a lot of architecture astronauts and developers in big companies promoted to architects whose only purpose was to create more layers, more frameworks, more abstractions and more complexity.

It’s not that there are no good Java tools and frameworks; it’s that there are too many bad ones, too many over-engineered ones, too many bureaucratic processes and methodologies, too many useless standards.

In such a messy world it’s not just the particular selection of tools you choose that affects your productivity. It’s mainly about you, about your values, about how you can reject the majority of solutions proposed to you by the community, vendors, co-workers and managers. It’s about you going against the current, about your common sense, about you questioning every mainstream belief and “best practice”.

That said, tools alone are not going to change your productivity much, and conversely, the right people can be productive with inferior tools too.

My advice:

• Don’t use a technology only because it’s standard, because everyone uses it, or because it’s officially recommended by Sun. Use a technology only if you personally think it’s the best tool for your job. This way you may find yourself rejecting technologies such as JSF, JSP, Web services, JMS, EJB, JTA, OSGi, MDA.
• Keep it simple, use your common sense, question everything. Do you really need to publish your objects for remote access? Do you really need to create another abstraction layer so that you can switch from Hibernate to TopLink? Do you really need to convert your data to/from XML ten times every time you need them? Do you really need XML schema? Do you really need everything to be configurable are interchangeable? At runtime? By non-developers?
• Keep the process simple. Be agile. Do you really need that documentation? Do you really need to describe every screen in a huge table, have it approved, type it in to some home-made tool and then generate JSP? Do you have competent programmers or you design everything first and programmers only “translate” to Java?
• WYSIWYG design of HTML doesn’t work.
• Graphical programming in general doesn’t work. This includes UML as blueprint and UML as programming language, MDA, drawing page flow diagrams. Code generation is bad.
• Never design a framework prior to using it, always harvest a framework.
• Prefer frameworks that have only little XML configuration.
• Strive for low LOC count. Look at actual characters in your code. Is every character important? Think. What can you do to make your code smaller? Do you need that class? What does it do? Why do you need to do that?
• Testing is not sacred cow; you don’t need 100 % test coverage. Test only what makes sense. If it’s difficult to test, make it simpler; or don’t test it at all. Don’t test visual appearance.

And finally, some concrete Java recommendations:

• For presentation layer try Tapestry. Why do I love it? Because with Tapestry you can create beautiful code. It’s designed specifically for that, so that your code can be beautiful. Your code. By beautiful I mean everything that matters – it’s short, easy to change, easy to read, easy to create your abstractions, and still flexible, it doesn’t try to hide the fact that you are developing for the web. Of course, it’s still you who makes your code beautiful.
• Feel free to use Hibernate, especially for CRUD and large apps. Don’t bother with JPA. It’s not a silver bullet though, with ORM you are always going to trade one set of problems with another.
• Only a little Spring, you shouldn’t need much since you’ve carefully avoided all the Java EE traps. Use dependency injection sparingly.
• After all of that, you may find the Java language too verbose and not very helpful when abstracting away you copy/pasted code. If you want to experiment, try Scala. The problem is that the main selling point of Scala is that you get all the benefits of modern languages while still keeping type safety, and at the same time, there is no solid IDE support. Being used to super-cool Java IDEs, it doesn’t make much sense to switch to Scala unless there’s an IDE support that is stable and reliable. Stable enough is not enough.

Answer 2

Frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Wicket certainly help to simplify and accelerate web development as they provide a high degree of testability and integrate very well. But it's not enough to reach RoR productivity, even if you have a good set of development practices. There is still too much technical stuff and plumbing required.

Grails is maybe the missing piece in this picture to get closer to RoR. It's my next experimentation.

BTW, my MDA experiences are the contrary of a productivity improvement so I won't mention them (actually, MDA was killing our productivity).