I’ve talked here before about SpringSource, which is interesting to me primarly because of what it represents a reaction to: namely that Java Enterprise Edition code is hard, and complex, and difficult to get right, and so of course if someone says “We can do most of what Java EE can do only a lot easier,” you’d find plenty of people who’d jump at the chance to try it out. There are other ways to deal with the complexity, of course. For instance, a lot of people end up writing scripts to automate the process of deploying Java EE apps to various semi-compatible application servers available.Phurnace was a company that tried to abstract you one step further away from that process, with its Deliver tools, which aim to automate this whole process. It’s a service that apparently has enough potential upside to merit Phurnace’s purchase by BMC, a software management company. The fact that this is a potentially lucrative market is to me something of a sad statement about just how complex enterprise Java is — and certainly the fact that various app servers can get a Java EE certification without being fully compatible is a big part of the problem. I’m sure Phurnace’s service is helpful, but in a perfect world it shouldn’t be necessary; it strikes me as somewhat parasitic, as someone making a buck off of a broken system.What do you think? Is complexity a necessary adjunct to computing power? Or is enterprise Java too tangled up for its own good? Software Development