There is a lot of chatter on the internet about Java EE being dead. As someone who spent a lot of time implementing some of the core specs like CDI and also helping customers adopt JavaEE I was interested in determining if this is true.
Unfortunately the anecdotal evidence points to JavaEE dying slowly. This is the evidence now points towards JavaEE being dead:
1. Many prominent Java EE evangelists - Folks who in some cases are friends and I admire deeply have left their respective Java EE shepherd companies. Reza Rahman from Oracle, Kenny Bastani from Oracle and Arun Gupta from Redhat to name just a few ...
2. Oracle, Redhat and IBM - the three most prominent supporters of JavaEE are now spending their money and developers innovating elsewhere. Oracle cloud,OpenShift and Bluemix respectively.
3. The advent of microservices has rendered the monolithic app-server dead. Gone are the days that you have the pack the kitchen sink in your app-server runtime. Nowadays developers ONLY want to use the runtime they want - case in point the rise of the micro-servers - Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Vert.x, Ratpack etc. The next evolution is the disappearance of these micro-servers and the move to serverless computing i.e. the developers are coding chained reactive lambda functions in the cloud. Not sure how I feel about that....
4. The pace of JavaEE specification implementation by vendors and the evolution of the specification itself has slowed to a glacial pace. Where is Java EE8 or Java EE9 ? Where is the Java EE equivalent of all the resiliency patterns like Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead and microservice patterns like service discovery, logging everything to stdout etc. CDI is the only major hope left for JavaEE. They need to rebase the entire platform on CDI and start innovating like crazy. Unfortunately this cannot be done by committee.
There is still a LOT of code running on application servers. WebSphere, WebLogic and JBOSS were the goto runtime and middleware OS in the 90s and early 2Ks. I care about these apps and if you do too start decomposing them and running them on lightweight runtimes like Spring Boot, Jetty whatever blows your horn. Then move these services to the cloud using Docker or Buildpacks. If the apps don't add any business value then move them to lighter runtimes within the JavaEE stack i.e. move to WebSphere Liberty or JBOSS Wildfly.
This should serve as a cautionary tale. I am sure a lot of people with disagree with what I have written. But hey this my opinion you should form one too ....
Au Revoir
Update: There is a new organization called Java EE Gaurdians https://dzone.com/articles/who-are-the-java-ee-guardians-and-why-you-should-c that seems to be JavaEEs best shot at survival.
Unfortunately the anecdotal evidence points to JavaEE dying slowly. This is the evidence now points towards JavaEE being dead:
1. Many prominent Java EE evangelists - Folks who in some cases are friends and I admire deeply have left their respective Java EE shepherd companies. Reza Rahman from Oracle, Kenny Bastani from Oracle and Arun Gupta from Redhat to name just a few ...
2. Oracle, Redhat and IBM - the three most prominent supporters of JavaEE are now spending their money and developers innovating elsewhere. Oracle cloud,OpenShift and Bluemix respectively.
3. The advent of microservices has rendered the monolithic app-server dead. Gone are the days that you have the pack the kitchen sink in your app-server runtime. Nowadays developers ONLY want to use the runtime they want - case in point the rise of the micro-servers - Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Vert.x, Ratpack etc. The next evolution is the disappearance of these micro-servers and the move to serverless computing i.e. the developers are coding chained reactive lambda functions in the cloud. Not sure how I feel about that....
4. The pace of JavaEE specification implementation by vendors and the evolution of the specification itself has slowed to a glacial pace. Where is Java EE8 or Java EE9 ? Where is the Java EE equivalent of all the resiliency patterns like Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead and microservice patterns like service discovery, logging everything to stdout etc. CDI is the only major hope left for JavaEE. They need to rebase the entire platform on CDI and start innovating like crazy. Unfortunately this cannot be done by committee.
There is still a LOT of code running on application servers. WebSphere, WebLogic and JBOSS were the goto runtime and middleware OS in the 90s and early 2Ks. I care about these apps and if you do too start decomposing them and running them on lightweight runtimes like Spring Boot, Jetty whatever blows your horn. Then move these services to the cloud using Docker or Buildpacks. If the apps don't add any business value then move them to lighter runtimes within the JavaEE stack i.e. move to WebSphere Liberty or JBOSS Wildfly.
This should serve as a cautionary tale. I am sure a lot of people with disagree with what I have written. But hey this my opinion you should form one too ....
Au Revoir
Update: There is a new organization called Java EE Gaurdians https://dzone.com/articles/who-are-the-java-ee-guardians-and-why-you-should-c that seems to be JavaEEs best shot at survival.
Rohit, what a stimulating topic :-)
ReplyDeletehttp://johnclingan.com/2016/03/04/investing-in-java-ee-the-right-way/