Three months ago, I explained what I thought was wrong with J2EE. More recently, a lot of controversy was stirred when J2EE developer extraordinaire Richard Monson-Haefel, now a senior analyst with the Burton Group, predicted the death of the J2EE architecture in a SOA-dominated world.

When a schmuck like myself makes such a prediction, nobody really pays attention, and it might be better that way. But Richard Monson-Haefel is no schmuck. In fact, in the world of J2EE, he is as much a mensch as anyone else. And when someone of his caliber goes on the way he did, it gets noticed.

I worked with Richard six years ago when Intalio contracted him and David Blevins to develop our Open Source EJB container, called OpenEJB. The code he and his team wrote went on to become the foundation for Apache Geronimo, the only serious competitor to JBoss. Through this experience, I developed a great deal of respect for Richard’s technical wizardry and pragmatic judgement, which is why I got interested by his recent positions.

Without getting back into the core of the debate — others are more qualified than I am for that — I must agree with Richard’s main point that J2EE as a platform has reached a level of complexity that makes it virtually unusable for even the most sophisticated Java developers. And for the rest of us, VB guys, PHP folks, or HTML crafters, J2EE is so arcane that we only wish we will never have to deal with.

That is not to say that J2EE won’t be used anymore — in fact most of Intalio|BPMS is built on top of the J2EE platform, but the primary developer using it will work for software vendors rather than be part of an IT staff. J2EE will be everywhere, but very few people will touch it directly, much like very few people actually write assembly code today.

For simple things, simpler frameworks such as Ruby on Rails will be used. And for the more complex tasks, developers will turn to bottoms-up or middle-out BPM solutions, using a BPEL editor or a BPMN designer to model fully executable processes in a Zero Code manner.

J2EE is dead! Long live J2EE!