Are the days of Java numbered?

For a long time now we have been hearing the gloom and doom predictions that Java is coming to an end. I personally like Java and although there are some valid points introduced by naysayers but is Java not stepping up to meet the challenge?

I have had some exposure to working with the older J2EE specification awhile ago and the nightmare that is J2EE made itself very obvious to me. As a result of this when the JEE5 specification was introduced many people including myself were extremely skeptical. The mere mention of the dreaded EJB acronym brought up visions brought shivers to my spine. That being said though I was still a bit curious. If the main mandate of the JEE5 specification was ease of use then really how easy is it to use?

My curiosity got the better of me so I started to delve a bit deeper. I started reading on Sun's GlassFish which was being toted as not only the RI but a fully blown production worthy product. Very interesting indeed. I was committed to learn more. The quickest way for me to get a hands on exposure I found was going through the NetBeans tutorials provided so I proceeded to download at that time NetBeans 5.5 and the bundled GlassFish version to get started.

Going through the very well described and presented tutorials I need to say I was impressed. The tight integration between the IDE and the application server had me stoked. I couldn't believe how easy it was to create a sample application build and deploy. This was certainly a long way from the configuration hell that was the traditional J2EE. The use of POJOs made things very nice since unit testing was very much simplified and I must say I'm a big fan of the annotation support.

Without getting too long winded I covered some more topics and was equally impressed with the simplicity in working with JSF, JPA and JAX-WS. I was truly excited.
I would advise anyone that feels the way I did to give it a try and put aside any horrid previous J2EE experiences you may have had. I'm sure you will find the experience a pleasure.

Once you get beyond the initial exposure there is an abundance of other easy and useful technologies you can leverage one of these being the remarkable product that JBoss put together called Seam. But that is for another day.

Too Many Frameworks

So after spending many years after as a developer I have seen technologies come and go and although all of these technologies had evangelists praising their greatness, there is always something new that comes along that proves to be better. Now as most software developers would agree it is great to learn new things but the time to do so is often overtaken by the pressures of meeting deadlines. Although it will more then likely never happen, it would be good to see a few concise specific solutions that no matter what could stand the test of time. Specifically in terms of developing enterprise based web driven applications :).