Spring Framework Vs. JEE – Part I

Am I playing with fire here. Perhaps Yes.

As many say, this truly classify itself to be a holy war for predominance and will surely stir some dirty stuff out into the air.

One of my colleagues recently came to me and had a small debate as to why the our organization selected Spring over JEE. He was very much in favor of JEE especially JEE 6.

We sometime back (more than an year) had an exercise in which the task was to choose organization wide Java framework. As you guessed right, we did have Spring Framework and JEE as strong candidates. Our approach was really methodical and a methodology which was devised internal to the organization was used.

In this methodology the two candidates was put into test. First of all, various architecture quality attributes were put in such as Performance, Scalability, Testability etc. and then various requirements in these attributes were classified/grouped together. Once we have that, we get the various stakeholders involved and get their buy in and their stand on the overall acceptance of these quality attributes and rank it. We then went on with POC (Proof of Concept) and each requirement was rated against each of the chosen frameworks.

Finally after a grueling exercise of rating various requirement for each of the framework, a final rating comes out which give good indication as to which on quality attributes gets favored for each of the framework and according to the stakeholders, which one to choose out of these two. The choice was made and there was no surprise, it was Spring Framework.

For our company now the chosen default framework is Spring and anything else if it is taken, it goes as an exception.

For me when i say that i use Spring Framework, it doesn’t in any way mean that i don’t use JEE. They cannot be mutually exclusive, rather when combined together, it gives immense advantage to the project that you are developing. We do use Spring as our choice of framework but haven’t just taken out JEE in any sense out of the window, rather when the right time comes another evaluation as detailed above will be done to asses the situation even further. Till that time i feel choosing Spring as the default framework is a good one in all aspects.

In my next blog (Click here), I would try to give some of the major points, which made us choose Spring as a default framework of choice for developing any application within the organization.

Earlier i have done couple of comparisons as detailed below:-

Spring Integration Vs. Apache Camel

Web Service Framework Comparison – 2013 – Part I

Web Service Framework Comparison – 2013 – Part II

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Tomcy John

Tomcy John

Blogger & Author at javacodebook
He is an Enterprise Java Specialist holding a degree in Engineering (B-Tech) with over 10 years of experience in several industries. He's currently working as Principal Architect at Emirates Group IT since 2005. Prior to this he has worked with Oracle Corporation and Ernst & Young. His main specialization is on various web technologies and acts as chief mentor and Architect to facilitate incorporating Spring as Corporate Standard in the organization.
Tomcy John

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