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I am reading a book on EJB. It list one advantage over the older techniques of EJB is that it free programmers from one specific application server vendor and its properietary APIs.
I am wondering what was the life before EJB came out? Which specific application server did programmer use in the old days? Could you give me a clue? Thanks.
In 1997-8, there were numerous application server products on the market. EJB and its cousins (JSP, Servlet, JDBC, JCA, etc) attempted to standardize the metaphor for programming server-side Java applications.
Some of the app servers on the market at that time were:
There were many others.
These app server products were, in a practical sense, defining the server-side app platform. They were inventing the metaphor of object-based server-side programming in Java. How to map an HTTP Session to a Java object? How to handle HTTP Authentication? How to handle administration? Each server-side product did it differently.
Many of these companies were small, and the half-life of the companies was short, maybe 12 months or so. At one point the people involved in WebLogic looked at the field and decided that there was too much variety; that Microsoft would be able to defeat each of them independently and thus “win” the server-side app platform battle. So they decided to band together and define a common API, to achieve a stronger competitive position with respect to Microsoft. This was the birth of J2EE. The ostensible benefit for customers was server-side platform portability.
In those days app server companies were tiny, so a good deal of risk was associated to committing to a particular app server API. standardized APIs like Servlet, JSP, and EJB diminished some of that risk, and it made it easier for a particular company to choose, let’s say, NetDynamics, knowing that if NetD went under, they’d be able to move their programs to WebLogic fairly easily. Platform portability was a big win for potential customers.