EJB and Web Services
When we started the current project a few months back, we decided to experiment with web services. We used Tomcat and Axis as our platform — I don’t remember the versions. Anyway, our app is a custom app for a client, it needs to bring down a lot of data and display it in a table and allow users to modify a few fields in each record. Once we started unit testing with real data, we determined that that web services was a bad fit. The initial download of data with the web service was over 15 minutes. (1.5 DSL with a VPN). Switching to EJBs brought the total down to around 30 seconds. Fortunately, we were not required to use Web Services and made the switch. I’m sure Web Services are a much better fit for other apps or in places where the server and client aren’t both Java. However, at this point I’d develop EJB and build Web Service bridges where required.
I have to wonder if the people who hype web services are using SOAP with binary attachments to get any sort of decent speed. The attachments negate most of the benefits of web services to me.