Java EE6 over EE5?

Question

We are at the edge of getting Java EE6 (with Glassfish v3 as reference implementation). Planned release is December 09. While still quite a number of companies are struggling to move their codebase to EE5 (from earlier versions), we are in the luxurious situation to start development of a new product and could choose to do it with EE6 as platform. That potentially avoids the migration effort at a later stage and benefit from all the rightsized features in EE6.

Contra or few of the problems (when doing things at the bleeding edge, aka using EE6):

• not much expertise around yet (blogs, books, forums, yourself,..)
• there wont be any other EE6 application server soon (beta's maybe early/mid next year ?)
• 3rd party libraries/frameworks are maybe not verified or tested against EE6 yet.

A generic question that would not result in a specific answer, but maybe your take on the topic ?

Sven

Answer 1

If you are in a luxurious situation to start a project with EE6, then I'd suggest to pioneer.

Not only the overall experience will matter in a short time (let's say EE6 will be mature and widely used in less than two years, imagine a bunch of Java EE6 experts when all the companies will switch), but EE6 is just plain simpler than EE5, so if you have members in the team that have only a little experience in Java EE, you'll probably get your job done faster.

There's already a book on Java EE6 with Glassfish v3, and the basics is not that different from the previous version (ie. if you stick to what you know from EE5, you'll be fine for a long time). Glassfish v3 is quite okay if you need the RI for Java EE6.

What kind of 3rd party libraries do you need?

Answer 2

How big and important is the project? Do you have any deadlines? I'm really eager to new technologies or frameworks but I rather suggest to begin with Java EE 5 and gradually migrate to Java EE 6. Java EE it's a big stack of technologies and in release time some of them will have not enough support from third party vendors. So my advice is: use these part of Java EE 6 that are mature at this time and have strong support from others vendors.