

Ask HN: Is JavaEE dead? - Raed667

I have just finished an engineering JavaEE course, yet it seems like no one in the business world is hieing (or working with) it anymore.<p>Is it worth the time, or do you think it is dead?
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zhte415
Java is definitely not dead. As others have said, it is alive and very much
kicking in Enterprise systems. Infact, if you or anyone reading this has an
inkling to live overseas and few years experience and is at Senior Engineer or
Team Lead level (corporate titles) it is great to leverage. Offshored
locations around the world (note, I don't say Outsourced, still within the
company) cry out for people with experience and international experience to
inject to their teams for 1-n years.

~~~
infinitone
First you said a few years experience then you said Senior Engineer... so
which one is it? I'd imagine by few you mean 1-5 years, is that enough to get
Senior title?

~~~
zhte415
Yes. Corporate titles. JSE 0-1 year experience, SE 2-4, SSE 5-7 typically.
There would be multiple SSEs on a team, a team 10-20 in size. So yes, SSE in 5
years is reasonable as a corporate title in multinational type companies.

Above that would be a Team Lead (late 20s/early 30s). A manager would manage
2-4 team leads. A Director / AVP 2-4 Managers. Technical Leads (senior non
managers - perhaps what you're thinking) would be dotted around as needed.

But a lot depends on the product and business line. A business line with a
simpler product would typically have everyone at 2-3 levels up the hierarchy
above a business line with a simpler product.

~~~
arisAlexis
I strongly disagree about your estimate that Team Leads in Corporations are
late 20s/early 30s. This may be in startups.

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CyberFonic
I come across many legacy systems that use JavaEE in my sysadmin work.

After a bit of searching I found that the jobs typically may be found by
searching for "Java Enterprise" \- surprisingly nothing turned up for me with
the search term "JavaEE". Of course, it depends which job board you are using
in your search - I tried Monster & Seek.

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needusername
Define dead. Oracle and IBM continue to make a lot of money with their
appservers in Fortune 500 companies. It fits their large bureaucracies well.

In the open source world things have been looking better. When Oracle dropped
commercial support for GlassFish so did interest in GlassFish drop. Some of
them migrated to WildFly / JBoss AS/EAP. TomEE has been the only new entry in
recent years and from the outside it seems they are struggling to deliver a
Java EE 7 (which is two years old) compliant server. Geronimo will be closed
down soon. Resin is in its on niche.

The other question is how you define Java EE. If you're using JPA in Tomcat,
is that Java EE? If you're using Bean Validation in Spring Boot, is that Java
EE?

But then again, has there ever been a time when Java EE had a good rep even
with Java developers or was it always something they had imposed on them by
"enterprise architects"?

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theandrewbailey
If you want to work in a big corporation or bank, then Java (or even C#/.NET)
is a good thing to have. If you want to work at a startup, it's not that
valuable.

For the past few weeks, recruiters have been calling me a few times a week
saying that they have Java positions that they need to fill, so it's
absolutely not 'dead'.

~~~
Raed667
And old offshore companies. I've been doing some research, startups usually
ask for some web-framework (Laravel,RoR,Django,Sails) or "big/traditional"
companies want J2EE expertise (and SAP).

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sunilgiri
If you are referring Java Platform by JavaEE, Its alive, please read below to
have an idea about next 20 years :)
[https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/6/4/the_next_twenty_ye...](https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/6/4/the_next_twenty_years_of_java_where_we_ve_been_and_where_we_re_going)

I develop on Java since 15 years, all these years I have seen most of the
fortune 500 customers trust Java platform for their enterprise systems.

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arisAlexis
I am not sure people are responding to your question because it is not clear.
Would you consider a servlet application server and an app that uses it JavaEE
even though it is not technically that? Google app engine uses it extensively
, Spring framework is built on it.Dropwizard is very popular for building REST
servers and Jersey too (and it is part of JavaEE 7) but these can also be used
with a JavaSE stack and a fast servlet server.

~~~
Raed667
I guess the definition of JavaEE itself is ambiguous then. What was introduced
to us in school was Wildfly, EJBs (Session Beans), JSF, Hibernate... That kind
of stuff.

~~~
arisAlexis
For example you can use Hibernate with projects that are not JavaEE and it's
certainly not wasted time , almost all Java job descriptions ask for Hibernate
knowledge.

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Raed667
OP here: I don't get why this question is getting so many down votes. If
you're an experienced dev this might seem trivial to you. But for someone who
just finished a 48 hours course called "JavaEE workshop" it isn't.

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canadiancreed
If it's dead, someone should tell the recruiters that keep spamming my inbox.
I've had four in the last month asking if I'd be interested in working on some
JavaEE projects, even though I have no experience in that (they probably see
Java and run with it)

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peterashford
IMO JavaEE has always sucked. That said, some big corps have invested a lot of
money in it and I doubt it'll be gone any time soon.

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thoman23
No, not dead. And a foundation in Java will still help if you do transition to
another language (read: Scala) in the future.

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akulbe
Yes, it's worth the time. No, it's not dead, AT ALL.

[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

"The TIOBE Programming Community index is an indicator of the popularity of
programming languages."

Java is #1.

Android apps are based on Java. It's not going _anywhere_ any time soon.

~~~
coldtea
JavaEE != Java.

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toolsadmin
Unfortunately not yet. JavaEE, and JSF specifically is garbage.

~~~
CyberFonic
Oracle are doing everything possible to discourage startups from using Java.

Pity that Android chose Java - but then again, back then it seemed like a good
idea (TM).

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k__
If you like to work on big legacy code bases, go for it.

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sogen
Definitely alive.

(a designer in a big company)

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lsllc
Forget J2EE, Java itself is dead. It got a bit of a shot-in-the-arm when
Google chose it as a language for Android and it's had some activity around
the JVM (e.g. Scala and also Twitter's fork of OpenJVM). But it's dead.

~~~
peterashford
[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

Number one.

Your FUD is utterly pathetic. Utterly. This BS needs to stop. You may not like
the language, fine. But dead? FFS.

~~~
infinitone
Whats interesting is if you look at the graph on that page... its as if all
the languages are losing popularity (all have somewhat of a downward
trajectory). One could argue that all that loss has gone into other not-index
languages...

