[nylug-talk] Why does "enterprise" imply "Java"?

[mike@jurney.org]

On Fri, 7 Jul 2006, Ajai Khattri wrote:

> Felix Shnir wrote:
> > JNDI is a small part of J2EE stack... There are more "enterprise"
> > stuff in
> > there =)  But generally, what I was trying to say before, is that Java
> > allows and has APIs for things that neither PHP, Ruby, nor Python have
> > simply because they didnt need it.
>
>
> So basically, JNDI allows you to store and share objects across machines?
>
>
> Ruby/RoR applications can do something similar with memcached or DRb
>  (distributed Ruby).

The point isn't what Java or Ruby can do with such-and-such project or
mechanism.  It's that J2EE is an enormous collection of well-defined APIs,
any of which can generally be implemented or extended by a third-party
vendor.

It's been mentioned that there's 30 major J2EE APIs; What makes J2EE
"Enterprisey" is that every one of them has a reference implementation
that an organization can choose to use or reimplement as they see fit
without breaking the other 29 major APIs.  It's not about what you can or
can't do with some combination of RoR and last week's CVS snapshot from
junktrunk.sourceforge.net, it's about being able to say something like
"JNDI" or "JDBC" or "JMS" and have the systems group at every major bank
in the world know exactly what you mean.  It's being able to say "our
product provides a JMS server which performs better than the reference
implementation in X, Y, and Z ways" to some IT group that's written an
internal product which uses the JMS API but is unhappy with the reference
implementation's speed.

-- 
Michael D. Jurney
mike at jurney.org