If You Are An Java EE (at least EJB) Consultant - You Should Not Rely On Crisis To Have Vacations...

I actually thought this year will be quiet - because of the "crisis", and planned to write some articles, books, doing some research and just enjoying "hacking" some cool not-commercial stuff. My planning didn't worked out - I got even more contracts (plus the planned articles, conferences and books :-)) then the years before, what seems to be not logical at the first glance. I even had to cancel some conference events and JUG meetings, because of the workload (sorry for that - I hate to cancel things).

I asked some clients about this trend, and it turns out, that especially bigger companies tend to rely on standards during the economic downturn to be as much as possible vendor independent. In fact EJBs 3.0 are the only remaining, vendor independent, component model which is now supported by Glassfish, Geronimo, JBoss, SAP, Oracle WLS, IBM and probably many others.

The portability story is very good - in my last three Java EE 5 years all the project were tested on several servers and were absolutely portable (there is nothing more vendor specific - just a JAR).  You can just move the application from one server to another copying the EAR - there is nothing more to do. The remaining issue is the quality of the application server, and especially the persistence itself - but this is always an issue.

I plan my vacations now in the next Web 3.0 wave then :-).