Mike Clark asks a good question:

"Tell me how to write a J2EE app that displays "Hello World" on a web page?"

Yes, with the war files, and descriptors and pre / post compiling, creating and deploying J2EE applications certainly is difficult.

But, quite frankly, I don't want an environment that makes "Hello, World" really easy. I'm rarely asked to write applications that display "Hello, World" on a web page. And If I really had to do that, I'd fake it by dropping an HTML file into the J2EE container's document root and pretend it was all dynamic.

I don't want an environment that makes the simple things even easier. I don't want another pet shop demo application, ATM, employee directory, or currency calculator.

If an environment makes the simple stuff easy while making the really difficult stuff next to impossible, that doesn't really serve anyone's needs. How about making it easy to have two J2EE containers communicate with one another. How about making it easy to map complex components to multiple relational tables, rather than making it moderately complicated to map a simple object to a single table? How about making it easy to query and manipulate the abstract schema, rather than making it somewhat mystical to walk across a few objects' relationships?

I don't care how easy it is to write "Hello, World." I'd like the really tough stuff made easier.