Java EE: The blue pill of enterprise development?

October 20, 2008 | 1 Minute Read
This post was originally posted on my old blog.

One thing that stroke me, when I first came across Carbonado was that it was originally developed by Amazon for internal use.

This is another example where a real big boy is not using standard technologies that are brain-fed to foot-soldiers like me out here in the trenches of enterprise development. [Other examples are all the upcoming cloud-technologies: Google AppEngine, Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Strata ...]

Sometimes I think I am stuck in some kind of matrix: I am brainwashed that Java EE gives me the right tools for enterprise development. Those tools are not really attractive and provoke a lot of suffering, but hey that's the price for being part of the enterprise!

Strangely, very often I stumble across enterprise-applications, that were entirely developed with those tools in a totally brainwashed and conform way. But they still suffer from exactly the problems that the tools promise to prevent (like performance, scalability, maintainability ...).

On the other hand, sometimes I get a glimpse behind the scenes of the real big boys, like eBay, Amazon or Google... and I get the impression, that there is not much of Java EE there.


I wonder, why might that be? Maybe I should start looking for the red pill...