Why should you chose to run your apps on a plain vanilla Tomcat/Jetty/Undertow servers with the Spring Framework instead of running on WebSphere Liberty Profile or any proprietary app server.
- Oracle has stopped investing in JavaEE. Java-Gaurdians. Java EE innovation driven through the JCP process is driven to a complete halt thanks to lack of investment by its major supporters and Oracle hosting the Java EE standard hostage with the proprietary TCK accessible only to Oracle and corporate licenses. [reboot]. Meanwhile innovation in the Spring community has taken off.
- Don't take my word on it. Read the analyst Stephen O' Grady's opinion on Spring Boot ... Better than ten years removed from the initial release of Rails, it seems strange to be writing about the “new” emphasis on projects intended to simplify the boostrapping process. But in spite of the more recent successes of projects like Bootstrap and Spring Boot, such projects are not the first priority for most technical communities. Perhaps because of the tendency to admire elegant solutions to problems of great difficulty, frameworks and on ramps to new community entrants tend to be an afterthought. In spite of this, they frequently prove to be immensely popular, because in any given community the people who know little about it far outnumber the experts. Even in situations, then, when the boot-oriented project and its opinions are outgrown, boot-style projects can have immense value simply because they widen the funnel of incoming developers.
- Thoughtworks technology radar now recommends Spring Boot as an ADOPT technology. A lot of work has gone into Spring Boot to reduce complexity and dependencies, which largely alleviates our previous reservations. If you live in a Spring ecosystem and are moving to microservices, Spring Boot is now the obvious choice. For those not in Springland, Dropwizard is also worthy of serious consideration.
- Developing applications using the full feature set of the WebSphere Liberty Profile will result in your application being non-portable to other app servers or migration from WebSphere Classic versions to the Liberty Profile. Furthermore you are offloading the control of your applications features to the app-server. Using Spring and vendored frameworks instead of provided dependencies at runtime yields control back to the application leading to a deterministic set of compile and runtime dependencies. Packaging apps with Spring lead to immutable artifacts.
- Idiomatic Applications written with the Spring Framework and Spring Boot on Pivotal Cloud Foundry running on a plain vanilla app server written in an idiomatic fashion are inherently 15 factor cloud native app. The applications are production-ready from the get-go.
- Organizations are now comfortable running business critical applications in production. Take a look at a recent Java Application Server survey report from Plumbr where the Tomcat installation base exceeded the 50% threshold for the second year in a row. The 58.22% share of the pie left no question about the winner.
