I ran across a question on LinkedIn today and gave a long-winded rant-like response that I thought I would post here, too.
Javabeans are hailed as reusabel software components. Is anybody aware of a market for these wigits?
My Answer: Yes, and it has been dominated by IBM and Oracle for the past decade. When the books were written that proposed business models around the technology the expectation was that Swing would win massive acceptance and that Applets would continue to be the key technology of rich web applications. None of this came to pass.
There was also the expectation of an open market of beans, which missed the fact that most developers would rather write their own and only reuse when directed, or until it becomes a habit from being directed to do so. The reuse is still mostly of internally developed beans or those that are part of vendor applications.
And the vendor applications mostly make the beans proprietary, i.e., they only run within their servers.
The exceptions to my cynical gut-reaction is the FOSS community, where many Java Beans and other reusable components can be found.
As Dennis Miller used to say “But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong”
© Scott S. Nelson