Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

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"lightweight" compared to traditional JEE, but so is everything!

This isn't going to make me popular on HN but: I don't think this is actually the case.

Back in the mid 2000s I built EJB services by defining simple interface and implementation classes. I consumed the service by by injecting the interface into my clients. I tested my consumers by mocking the interface.

Now I build REST services. I have to define and document a complex dance of verbs, nouns, and payloads. Client code requires stitching together text fragments into URLs and JSON. There's no typechecking across API boundaries and testing requires me to stub out crappy HTTP libraries.

Hmmmm.

There are good things to say about REST (like transparency and ubiquity), but it's not totally clear to me that the world is better off now than we were back in those Dark Days. Yeah, there was a lot of awful EJB code, but I'm finding no shortage of shitty REST microservice code floating about nowadays.

The way I remember it is if you were single-stack from client to server, yeah, EJBs and others in the J2EE worked pretty well.

On the other hand, if you wanted to get of the rails and have clients in multiple stacks and clients who talked to different stacks, then it just all fell apart. Even multiple vendors in the J2EE space could be a problem.

Being able to do things simply hid a lot of complexity. It was hard to investigate that complexity when things went wrong.

It feels like chaos today, with myriad front-end frameworks and best practices changing every three months, but I would take this over mid-2000's Java tech because it just simply seems like less magic. I can break out Postman and just see what's going on.

I agree that there's no golden bullet, and that there's no end of crappy REST definitions. Furthermore, it's mostly not even REST, not in a HATEOAS kind of way.

But that's ok, I still feel more productive than I did 15 years ago, and I wouldn't want to go back.

I've witnessed a similar journey, having worked on an application 15 years ago that (for various reasons that made sense at the time) used RMI calls between a bunch of presentation logic and a service layer.

It was refactored into a J2EE application after 7 years, and is now being refactored into a group of microservices, which causes a number of the longer-lived devs in the team to suggest everything old is new again.

I agree with you, the hate on JEE seems to steam from younger developers not burned what came before it.

And REST now with tooling like Swagger is catching up with what SOAP already provided out of the box.

Kids, there are reasons why those features where there in first place.

REST is so passe. The crowd now uses Protobuf with gRPC, retro like 1995.

Is this an argument for using something like protobufs?

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