The novel A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge is set in the distant future.
The character Pham Nuwen is responsible for maintaining software whose
components are thousands of years old. Today, however, it's difficult to
imagine maintaining an Enterprise Java application for more than a few years.
More often than not, the application is tightly coupled to infrastructure
frameworks that evolve rapidly in ways that don't preserve backwards
compatibility. Consequently, upgrading to a new and improved framework can be
challenging and risky.
Fortunately, there's now a much better way to build Enterprise Java
applications: Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs), which are classes that don't
implement infrastructure framework-specific interfaces, and non-invasive
frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, JDO, and EJB 3, which provide services
for POJOs.
Using POJOs future proofs yo... (more)