2 <document xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/XDOC/2.0"
3 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
4 xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/XDOC/2.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/xdoc-2.0.xsd">
7 <title>overview</title>
8 <author email="erik@brakkee.org">Erik Brakkee</author>
11 <section name="Introduction">
12 <p> The utilities library consists of software to support development of Java and in
13 particular Java EE applications. I started this in 2005 when I realized that it would be
14 very nice to have a support library readily available instead of having to cut and paste
16 <p> There are many purposes for this documentation: </p>
18 <li>To allow others to use this library.</li>
19 <li>To allow myself to use the library(!). This is because I have written a lot of stuff in
20 the past and need to make sure I have good enough documentation describing what I have
21 made and how to use it. </li>
22 <li>To document the current state of development. In particular, some parts may be
23 deprecated because of other developments).</li>
24 <li>To allow extension of the library.</li>
26 <p> See the links on the left side for information about various components of the utilities
30 <section name="Philosopy">
31 <p> Some parts in the utilities library may seem familiar to users of other popular frameworks
32 such as <a href="http://www.springframework.org">Spring</a> and <a
33 href="http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/">Guice</a>. This is not always a coincidence.
34 It is my view that there many good IOC
35 frameworks but that it is not a good idea to tie into any one of them
36 specifically. Also, the support that one actually needs to develop applications and in
37 particular enterprise applications efficiently only requires a few basic support utilities
38 and typically not a big framework. </p>
39 <p>Apart from this, there are many other interesting developments going on: </p>
41 <li><em>Java EE 6 dependency injection:</em> Java EE 6 provides a powerful dependency
42 injection framework called <a href="http://jcp.org/en/jsr/summary?id=299">Contexts and
43 Dependency Injection (CDI)</a>, that contains a lot of experience from proven frameworks
44 such as Spring and Guice. In particular, I think CDI can be viewed as a standardization of
45 Guice (although some people might disagree). This, in effect, should make anyone think
46 twice before depending heavily on a 3rd party IOC framework instead of using CDI. </li>
47 <li><em>Lightweight component technologies:</em> Integration of lightweight component
48 technologies such as <a href="http://www.osgi.org">OSGI</a> and Java EE is under way which
49 will also shift the balance. In effect, the enterprise spec for OSGI was released March
50 23rd 2010 and Glassfish V3 is already partly using it. </li>
52 <p> In particular, I believe that Java EE 6 with new powerful concepts such as singleton
53 beans, lifecycle management, Contexts and Dependency Injection, used in combination with Enterprise OSGI will
54 provide the most powerful way to develop applications in the future. In this. I am making
55 only an exception for web frameworks to which I think JSF is not a good solution. I would
56 use <a href="http://wicket.apache.org">Wicket</a> anyday if it's up to me. </p>