No-Fluff-Just-Stuff founder, Jay Zimmerman, likes to refer to what he
calls the WOO factor - window of opportunity - when talking about the
dynamics of our software development industry.

For me, Adobe Flex is a case in point of the WOO factor that he talks
about. It's a technology that was ready and in position at the right
time to become a dominant RIA solution. In contrast Java was caught
with nothing to show in the RIA space. It missed the WOO.

Right now, I have a server-side project that will be built on OSGi.
It's here today, has a proven track record (Eclipse), and solves the
problems of project size scalability that we need to grapple with over
product life time.

Once again, just as EJB3 missed the WOO and has been eclipsed by
Spring Framework, whatever standard that Sun will end up backing via a
JSR to address this space will miss the WOO.

Why am I writing this as though I'm lamenting a sad development? I
guess that's a good question. There's really nothing to be down about.
Great software solutions on the Java platform exist outside of JSR
land. Indeed, maybe the very best software used in Java circles has
been the non JSR stuff.

In coming to the Java community I've never had a problem sidestepping
the nonsense being peddled and instead adopted what made sense. With
JEE I completely ignored session and entity beans and just used JMS
MDBs and Hibernate. So in 2003/2004 I built a distributed system
system on principals that the SOA dudes are all crowing about now.

More recently I've completely ignored MVC web frameworks on the server-
side and instead went with RIA + SOA where MVC is completely done on
the client-side. (Doing MVC on the server-side in defiance of the
Fallacies of Distributed Computing was wrong headed from the get go.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing

So here we stand today poised to fish or cut bait on this matter of
large scale SOA-based development on the server-side - and we badly
need a modularity solution for Java.