Andrej Koelewijn

Just read an article by floyd marinescu about the new features in j2ee 1.4.(
part 1 and part 2.) It’s a good article, although i would have liked some code examples.

The biggest improvement is probably the inclusion of all the api’s required for web services, but also the EJB improvements are usefull. I didn’t know ORDER BY and aggregate functions such as COUNT and SUM were missing, how can you live without them? I mosly use (p.o.) JDBC and DAO’s so i’m not too familiar with EJB-QL. Also a timer-service has been added to the J2EE container, although if you want to do some real complex scheduling this may be a better solution (obviously i’m a bit biased here

It’s also nice to see that JSP’s have been made easier by the new expression language and the tag files, which allow you to implement a tag without creating a class for it. (I’ll have to try it, maybe i’ll like it enough to stop using velocity?)
Other improvements are the improved management and deployment support and the j2ee connectors have also been improved.

Not sure what Kumar is trying to say in his blog. Of course there is a difference between open source and open standards. I think this is recognized by many people. Both are important, although I think open standards are more important than open source.

Recently in the Netherlands some political parties, like groen links, have suggested using open source for government use. This is also happening in other countries, such as Germany. I think this focus on open source is maybe too much. I think it would be better if governments would make open standards mandatory. Simple example, text documents should be based on an open standard, not on Microsoft Word. When looking for new word processing software, only software that supports open standards should be considered. Maybe this would force microsoft to support an open standard in Word, for example the Open Office text format. This would make real competition a possibility, as it would be easier for other companies (or groups) to offer compatible text processing software.

And then the next step may be open source…