14 ms·

Oracle and the fall of Java EE

191 points by SanderMak 10y ago

markokrajnc 10y ago
Java EE is a set of mostly bad libs for Java SE. Unfortunately the upper management has seen it as a "better Java SE"...
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Sadest part is that it diffused into education.
  - Synaesthesia 10y ago
    Agree! Over here we're teaching it to high school kids, when I think Python will be a lot more suitable and enjoyable.
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      Please introduce value oriented recursion (not just pretty printing). Like powerset, or countdown functions. Link them to Pascal triangle and then recursively defined series. Combinatorics, factorials, (1+x/a)^n .. etc etc. Tell them it looks fucked up dull and alien, for now.
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
I may wrong you, but I won't click on a link to "techsticles"
- douche 10y ago
  It's not Jamie Zawinski, so I assure you, you won't end up seeing an actual "techsticle"
- GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
  Agreed. That name definitely falls under the category of "clever for all the wrong reasons".
mianos 10y ago
Sure, technology changes. I this case it is positive, moving away from monolithic bags of tricks to lighter services. That is all good for Java. But, we will be looking to moving away because Oracle can no longer be trusted.
- dozzie 10y ago
  To monolithic, interdependent bag of lighter tricks. Microservices don't magically make developers know how to design.
  - mianos 10y ago
    Agree, it makes things harder to design and much harder to debug. The win is down the track.
  - bognition 10y ago
    There is nothing magic about microservices and people who think they are run the risk of getting burned bad. Even though each individual component is smaller and easier to reason about complexity still exists but its usually hidden in the interactions between the services. That said there are tremendous benefits of being able to develop/test/deploy incrementally, its all about balancing the trade-offs.
itaysk 10y ago
Java always had an awesome open source community around it that produced frameworks, libraries and tools that inspired many other communities. but at it's core, Oracle was and still is the exact opposite of open (JVM, J2EE as examples). That makes me wander why Java was always considered the icon of open source.
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  I would argue that Java's success owes more to Maven Central that it does to anything Sun or Oracle did with the language itself. Maven Central is Java's CPAN, and that's what you need in order to build a thriving open source ecosystem.
StevePerkins 10y ago
Amen. Be it Hacker News, or the /r/java subreddit, or wherever, it feels like the bulk of Java chatter revolves around... 1. Security vulnerabilities 2. The Ask.com toolbar 3. Oracle abandoning Java EE ... which is extremely frustrating because... 1. Virtually all of the "security vulnerabilities" deal with the browser plugin for using applets, which hasn't been widely used in 15 years 2. The toolbar malware, while stupid beyond measure, only applies to the consumer Java installer, which nobody installs anymore due to item #1 above. 3. Java EE is legacy tech. While deeply entrenched, most of the work out there for it today consists of maintenance or migration to more service-friendly approaches like Spring or Dropwizard. Java is certainly not perfect. It's also long in the tooth, and is associated with "the enterprise", and so it's not seen as "sexy" by young developers. But for business software, large-scale data processing, and web/REST backends, I've yet to find anything on the horizon that seriously competes with it. Every year I get bored and go exploring a new alternative language in side projects. Every year I come back, more appreciative of what I have. Python/Ruby/Node have their beginner-friendly charms, but are limited by the lack of type checking and/or chaotic ecosystems. Golang seems really promising, but has a long way to go. C# seems like the most credible challenger for business systems, but the .NET Core ecosystem is probably still years away from being where Java was in 2005. I don't mind discussing Java's shortcomings. But I'm tired of hearing about irrelevant shortcomings such as applets and Java EE. Because that's just a way to keep a "language war" going without having to point at a serious alternative.
- Longhanks 10y ago
  And now imagine where Java could be if the ecosystem wasn't completely fucked up by oracle. Imagine a Java with a sane, user friendly installer, an open source community supported by a big corporation, actual development, no completely insane lawsuits. Instead, developers want to abandon the JVM platform. They actively seek new platforms and create them. The damage is done.
  - claystu 10y ago
    What's so hard about the JVM install? I googled for "java download" and this was my first hit: https://java.com/en/download/ https://java.com/en/download/ Went there and found a single, totally obvious button labeled "Free Java Download" that detects your browser and Operating System and makes sure you download the proper version of the JVM. How much easier could it be?
brown9-2 10y ago
Realistically, Java EE "fell" a long time ago, once people realized you could use Spring or Guice or other frameworks to help organize your code without relying on terribly designed APIs from Sun/Oracle for simple things like "I want to handle a http request".
altendo 10y ago
I understand the viewpoint put forth here, but I think the big issue is making sure Java EE continues even as Oracle decides it's no longer worth the investment. I don't know how easily a group or organization (like Apache) can take charge of it given trademarks, patents, and the like.
elgabogringo 10y ago
Everybody hates Oracle, but people still give them so much money! One has to wonder when it will end now that there are alternatives.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  Developers hate Oracle, but enterprises give them money.
  - TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
    I've worked with a lot of software that uses Oracle on the backend. Our company wasn't buying Oracle, but I'm sure the company we were paying for the software was giving Oracle a lot of money. However, I don't think this is the biggest reason that Oracle is the behemoth they are. I think it's the US government. I expect that everything in the federal government runs on an Oracle server. Just a guess, though. I just can't fathom how enterprise sales can float a company that everyone supposedly hates.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  They solve business problems.
- nickpeterson 10y ago
  Remember that sales is mostly about relationships. Your CEO will hand a few million to someone they trust. Oracle projects an image of being the large company that other large companies trust. SAP has a similar vibe. Your C-Level people don't want to play dice with tech because to them it's often a cost center whose disruption can be terrible for business. You'll notice most engineering focused companies don't use Oracle because they decide on tech based on different criteria and allow more input from engineering and don't mind building things. They have to bet on tech or else they have no reason to exist.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    Last time I looked around it seemed a lot of "engineering focused companies" like tech startups were using garbage like MongoDB, the famously lossy database. I wouldn't assume that big companies are automatically incompetent and "tech focused companies" ignore Oracle for good reasons. It can as well be just fashion and/or groupthink and/or cost reasons.
ufmace 10y ago
I do mostly C#, and don't know very much about the Java ecosystem, and I could barely understand anything in that article due to all of the Java jargon. Can anybody summarize what the point is for somebody who hasn't spent their career knee-deep in the Java ecosystem?
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  Java has several APIs. From what I can tell, profiles are pre-chosen sets of APIs. But the author is against these (waste of time), and wants devs to choose for themselves, and the server should be able to efficiently load them when needed. And microservices, just because.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  Java EE is basically the official java server-side container. It was designed to scale, it kind of forced a designed pattern (something called 'Enterprise Beans' - one bean for dealing with requests, stateful beans for dealing with sessions etc.) It got huge and bloated. Some people came along and created some lighter frameworks. Arguably - Node.js - the javascript container is the real extension of this: it's incredibly light, can handle zillions of connections, you install the packages you need, it's totally open source. And it's in javascript which is uniquely well positioned to do a lot of 'asynchronous' stuff. Passing functions around with callbacks is possibly in Java but it's just bulky. Mostly due to the nature of typing. It's even kind of bulky in Apple Swift, for example. Java is a great language, that has made some improvements with lambdas etc.
  - BigJono 10y ago
    Does Java have an equivalent to the Promise system in Javascript? I find it much more usable than callbacks for async-heavy applications.
    - Delmania 10y ago
      In either SE or EE, no. Most people use Google's Guava library, which contains Futures that have that functionality.
johan_larson 10y ago
What are the current best bets for writing web apps in Java? Play! is convenient, but how does it compare to Spring Boot?
- kitd 10y ago
  If you simply want to serve a web ui, Play and Spring Boot are good. Play is a bit more self-contained. It provides a lot but doing something a bit out of the ordinary can be challenging. Spring Boot is more agnostic in that respect but relies (obviously) on Spring for dependency handling. As well as those 2, Dropwizard is excellent if you're writing REST apis and provides many enterprise-friendly features out of the box. SparkJava (don't confuse with Apache Spark) is a very lightweight Sinatra/Flask-like framework using Java 8 features, and good for REST apis too. 2 more to consider IMHO: Vert.x, and Comsat from Parallel Universe. Parallel Universe have one of the most interesting technologies in Java-land IMO. They provide a library called Quasar that adds suspendable green threads (similar to Erlang processes) to your code using bytecode instrumentation. This allows a single server to handled a huge number (think 00,000s) of concurrent connections. Vert.x has support for Quasar too. I'm sure others have favourites too. https://www.playframework.com/ https://www.playframework.com/ http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/ http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/ http://www.dropwizard.io/0.9.3/docs/ http://www.dropwizard.io/0.9.3/docs/ http://sparkjava.com/ http://sparkjava.com/ http://vertx.io/ http://vertx.io/ http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/comsat/ http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/comsat/
  - FuNe 10y ago
    Also http://www.ninjaframework.org/ http://www.ninjaframework.org/
  - stickfigure 10y ago
    http://gwizard.org/ http://gwizard.org/
- Yhippa 10y ago
  https://jhipster.github.io https://jhipster.github.io It's actually based on Spring Boot.
geodel 10y ago
Java EE is described by some as old, heavy, over engineered technology as opposed to Java SE + simple servlet containers with some Spring or other 'lightweight' frameworks. However in my opinion there is something about Java/Java designers at Sun/Oracle/IBM that lead to over designed APIs and code. Looking at just Java servlet api, it is described in most elaborate manner. It is not about supporting Http Listeners endpoints + some additional features but about any kind of servlets possible for past and future protocols. It is awkward and lacking features for practical Web based applications but still has 74 class just for specifying servlets and no implementation. So arguments about Java SE vs Java EE vs Spring vs Other hot Java framework seems facile to me. Java it self has set the tone to describe things in most elaborate manner, not most succinct manner and anything on top of that more or less follow that tradition.
- FuNe 10y ago
  My feeling too. I believe it comes from Architecture Astronauting: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html Java/enterprise world is pestered by such guys.
- krylon 10y ago
  About eight years ... nine years ago, I was between jobs and thought I might use the large amounts of free time I had at my hands to learn something that might improve my chances of finding a new job. Lots of companies use Java EE, right? So I downloaded the JDK, Glassfish and a PDF of a book called "The Java EE tutorial" from Sun. I found it slightly disturbing that Glassfish (or was it JBoss? It was so long ago...) used ~400-450 MB of RAM before I had done anything to it. And then I started reading the so-called tutorial. The fact that it had ~1100 pages should have tipped me of, but it did not frighten me. When I looked and the Table of Contents, however, which came with a freaking flow chart on how to navigate your way through the book depending on what you already knew, I ran away screaming. ;-) And to be fair, in my brief attempt to learn C++ I, too, looked at my first slightly-nontrivial-toy-program when it was finished and found it incredibly over-engineered. So I know how easy it can be to give in to that temptation. Also, there is this old saying that a given piece of software will reflect the organizational structure that created it, if large corporations send hordes of programmers to attack such a problem as creating Java EE or the servlet API, it is not a surprising result. In a way, .Net has the same problem, to a degree. I have not used it much, but one of my first toy programs was an address book that got its data from the Active Directory, and the LDAP API was significantly more complex than, say, Net::LDAP in Perl. Not unusable, but the difference is noteworthy.
sandGorgon 10y ago
Is it fashionable to bash java ? What about https://github.com/graalvm/truffle https://github.com/graalvm/truffle or https://bitbucket.org/allr/fastr/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/allr/fastr/wiki/Home or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUo3BFMwQFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUo3BFMwQFo ? There is serious innovation happening in java land (through Oracle - without talking about Clojure, etc.) Java EE exists because of the need to support large legacy, enterprise customers. For those who are starting out in Java web frameworks, people usually use Spring or Spring Bootstrap (and sometimes the newer Java 8 only http://sparkjava.com/ http://sparkjava.com/).
- chvid 10y ago
  It has been fashionable to bash java for the past +10 years.
  - mohaine 10y ago
    Yes. And Spring is a large part of the of the reason, not the solution. Every time you see somebody making fun of Java for AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean and its like they are actually making fun of Spring, not Java. Btw, that is a real class, not a made up example. http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.0.x/api/org/springframework/aop/framework/AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.html http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.0.x/api/org/sp...
    - sandGorgon 10y ago
      again, it is the enterprise market. But then there is spring-boot http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/#quick-start http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/#quick-start
huherto 10y ago
I dislike Oracle as a company. I whish Sun had been acquired by Google instead. But the Java ecosystem is awesome. The language is great, the JVM is great. As long as you know what you are doing.
- krylon 10y ago
  As far as I remember, Google was not even interested in buying Sun (at least not wholesale). The other company that was engaged in negotiations was IBM, which could have gone either way, I guess, if they had bought Sun.
patrick_vbn 10y ago
Wildfly Swarm (http://wildfly-swarm.io/ http://wildfly-swarm.io/) seems like the exact adaptation the author is looking for. "Swarm offers an innovative approach to packaging and running JavaEE applications by packaging them with just enough of the server runtime to "java -jar" your application."
einrealist 10y ago
Nice post! I have the same opinion. I guess, most people who make a scene about Oracle's stance think that Java EE is the same as the JCP. The JCP will go on and JSRs that are part of EE will continue to evolve. Its just a question of which JSRs still have value in a world of fast changing cloud / compute infrastructures.
dboreham 10y ago
I think that as with many things, you need to follow the money: Someone has to pay for the talented and expensive people needed to develop, maintain and extend a language/ecosystem ("community" does not == free of cost). It isn't obvious to me what the underlying motivation would be to drive the investment required. For Swift/C#/Golang it seems to be roughly "Platform Entrenchment" or perhaps "if not this then we're owned by $otherbigco". Oracle doesn't really have a platform to entrench these days.
kol 10y ago
The wait is over, here is Oracle's official response to the rumors: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/not-dead-yet-oracle-promises-big-plans-for-java-ee/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/not-de...
niftich 10y ago
The author's recommendations are: > 1. Drop the profiles. They are useless and pointless waste of time. This is true, but profiles exist mostly for the benefit of vendors, not developers. Developers only care about modularity, see #2. > 2. Make Java EE a conglomeration of technologies that are known to work together (i.e. JPA, JTA, JMS), but don't force their full installation. Let the use pick and choose what they want. Just be sure that they work together in pieces or in totality. You can do this today, if you use good implementations for those APIs (JMS, JPA) > 3. Make it modular. Start with zero and let people add what they want to use. Same as #2, plus Jigsaw. > 4. Get rid of the tree class loader. You need it matrix based. OSGi is fine. Jigsaw is fine. But it needs to have classes that can be loaded and unloaded without an impact on the container. > 5. The container itself should be a thin shell with remote capabilities (again OSGi/Karaf looks really good here) The OSGi spec gets a bad rep for complexity, but it actually solves a hard problem. Karaf's default UI, on the other hand, is terrible. > 6. Make it cloud friendly. Microservices needs to be core functionality, lightweight, and run in the cloud. Uhh, it's pretty cloud friendly now. Not sure what the author wants here. Ultimately the author says, if you're invested in the Java EE ecosystem, you can't rely on Oracle to move it forward, but you shouldn't let their inaction lead to your inaction. However, due to IP reasons and a perceived past overengineering, the community has nearly given up on Java EE and focuses on Java SE instead. This means that they've adopted points #1, #2, #3 and #6, and are actually moving the ecosystem forward, just piecewise and no longer under the 'Java EE' name.

191 points by SanderMak 10y ago

Java EE is a set of mostly bad libs for Java SE. Unfortunately the upper management has seen it as a "better Java SE"...

agumonkey 10y ago
Sadest part is that it diffused into education.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Agree! Over here we're teaching it to high school kids, when I think Python will be a lot more suitable and enjoyable.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Please introduce value oriented recursion (not just pretty printing). Like powerset, or countdown functions. Link them to Pascal triangle and then recursively defined series. Combinatorics, factorials, (1+x/a)^n .. etc etc. Tell them it looks fucked up dull and alien, for now.

_Codemonkeyism 10y ago

I may wrong you, but I won't click on a link to "techsticles"

douche 10y ago
It's not Jamie Zawinski, so I assure you, you won't end up seeing an actual "techsticle"
GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
Agreed. That name definitely falls under the category of "clever for all the wrong reasons".

mianos 10y ago

Sure, technology changes. I this case it is positive, moving away from monolithic bags of tricks to lighter services. That is all good for Java. But, we will be looking to moving away because Oracle can no longer be trusted.

dozzie 10y ago
To monolithic, interdependent bag of lighter tricks. Microservices don't magically make developers know how to design.
- mianos 10y ago
  Agree, it makes things harder to design and much harder to debug. The win is down the track.
- bognition 10y ago
  There is nothing magic about microservices and people who think they are run the risk of getting burned bad. Even though each individual component is smaller and easier to reason about complexity still exists but its usually hidden in the interactions between the services. That said there are tremendous benefits of being able to develop/test/deploy incrementally, its all about balancing the trade-offs.

itaysk 10y ago

Java always had an awesome open source community around it that produced frameworks, libraries and tools that inspired many other communities. but at it's core, Oracle was and still is the exact opposite of open (JVM, J2EE as examples). That makes me wander why Java was always considered the icon of open source.

StevePerkins 10y ago
I would argue that Java's success owes more to Maven Central that it does to anything Sun or Oracle did with the language itself. Maven Central is Java's CPAN, and that's what you need in order to build a thriving open source ecosystem.

StevePerkins 10y ago

Amen. Be it Hacker News, or the /r/java subreddit, or wherever, it feels like the bulk of Java chatter revolves around... 1. Security vulnerabilities 2. The Ask.com toolbar 3. Oracle abandoning Java EE ... which is extremely frustrating because... 1. Virtually all of the "security vulnerabilities" deal with the browser plugin for using applets, which hasn't been widely used in 15 years 2. The toolbar malware, while stupid beyond measure, only applies to the consumer Java installer, which nobody installs anymore due to item #1 above. 3. Java EE is legacy tech. While deeply entrenched, most of the work out there for it today consists of maintenance or migration to more service-friendly approaches like Spring or Dropwizard. Java is certainly not perfect. It's also long in the tooth, and is associated with "the enterprise", and so it's not seen as "sexy" by young developers. But for business software, large-scale data processing, and web/REST backends, I've yet to find anything on the horizon that seriously competes with it. Every year I get bored and go exploring a new alternative language in side projects. Every year I come back, more appreciative of what I have. Python/Ruby/Node have their beginner-friendly charms, but are limited by the lack of type checking and/or chaotic ecosystems. Golang seems really promising, but has a long way to go. C# seems like the most credible challenger for business systems, but the .NET Core ecosystem is probably still years away from being where Java was in 2005. I don't mind discussing Java's shortcomings. But I'm tired of hearing about irrelevant shortcomings such as applets and Java EE. Because that's just a way to keep a "language war" going without having to point at a serious alternative.

Longhanks 10y ago
And now imagine where Java could be if the ecosystem wasn't completely fucked up by oracle. Imagine a Java with a sane, user friendly installer, an open source community supported by a big corporation, actual development, no completely insane lawsuits. Instead, developers want to abandon the JVM platform. They actively seek new platforms and create them. The damage is done.
- claystu 10y ago
  What's so hard about the JVM install? I googled for "java download" and this was my first hit: https://java.com/en/download/ https://java.com/en/download/ Went there and found a single, totally obvious button labeled "Free Java Download" that detects your browser and Operating System and makes sure you download the proper version of the JVM. How much easier could it be?

brown9-2 10y ago

Realistically, Java EE "fell" a long time ago, once people realized you could use Spring or Guice or other frameworks to help organize your code without relying on terribly designed APIs from Sun/Oracle for simple things like "I want to handle a http request".

altendo 10y ago

I understand the viewpoint put forth here, but I think the big issue is making sure Java EE continues even as Oracle decides it's no longer worth the investment. I don't know how easily a group or organization (like Apache) can take charge of it given trademarks, patents, and the like.

elgabogringo 10y ago

Everybody hates Oracle, but people still give them so much money! One has to wonder when it will end now that there are alternatives.

ascagnel_ 10y ago
Developers hate Oracle, but enterprises give them money.
- TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
  I've worked with a lot of software that uses Oracle on the backend. Our company wasn't buying Oracle, but I'm sure the company we were paying for the software was giving Oracle a lot of money. However, I don't think this is the biggest reason that Oracle is the behemoth they are. I think it's the US government. I expect that everything in the federal government runs on an Oracle server. Just a guess, though. I just can't fathom how enterprise sales can float a company that everyone supposedly hates.
Spooky23 10y ago
They solve business problems.
nickpeterson 10y ago
Remember that sales is mostly about relationships. Your CEO will hand a few million to someone they trust. Oracle projects an image of being the large company that other large companies trust. SAP has a similar vibe. Your C-Level people don't want to play dice with tech because to them it's often a cost center whose disruption can be terrible for business. You'll notice most engineering focused companies don't use Oracle because they decide on tech based on different criteria and allow more input from engineering and don't mind building things. They have to bet on tech or else they have no reason to exist.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  Last time I looked around it seemed a lot of "engineering focused companies" like tech startups were using garbage like MongoDB, the famously lossy database. I wouldn't assume that big companies are automatically incompetent and "tech focused companies" ignore Oracle for good reasons. It can as well be just fashion and/or groupthink and/or cost reasons.

ufmace 10y ago

I do mostly C#, and don't know very much about the Java ecosystem, and I could barely understand anything in that article due to all of the Java jargon. Can anybody summarize what the point is for somebody who hasn't spent their career knee-deep in the Java ecosystem?

theandrewbailey 10y ago
Java has several APIs. From what I can tell, profiles are pre-chosen sets of APIs. But the author is against these (waste of time), and wants devs to choose for themselves, and the server should be able to efficiently load them when needed. And microservices, just because.
jomamaxx 10y ago
Java EE is basically the official java server-side container. It was designed to scale, it kind of forced a designed pattern (something called 'Enterprise Beans' - one bean for dealing with requests, stateful beans for dealing with sessions etc.) It got huge and bloated. Some people came along and created some lighter frameworks. Arguably - Node.js - the javascript container is the real extension of this: it's incredibly light, can handle zillions of connections, you install the packages you need, it's totally open source. And it's in javascript which is uniquely well positioned to do a lot of 'asynchronous' stuff. Passing functions around with callbacks is possibly in Java but it's just bulky. Mostly due to the nature of typing. It's even kind of bulky in Apple Swift, for example. Java is a great language, that has made some improvements with lambdas etc.
- BigJono 10y ago
  Does Java have an equivalent to the Promise system in Javascript? I find it much more usable than callbacks for async-heavy applications.
  - Delmania 10y ago
    In either SE or EE, no. Most people use Google's Guava library, which contains Futures that have that functionality.

johan_larson 10y ago

What are the current best bets for writing web apps in Java? Play! is convenient, but how does it compare to Spring Boot?

kitd 10y ago
If you simply want to serve a web ui, Play and Spring Boot are good. Play is a bit more self-contained. It provides a lot but doing something a bit out of the ordinary can be challenging. Spring Boot is more agnostic in that respect but relies (obviously) on Spring for dependency handling. As well as those 2, Dropwizard is excellent if you're writing REST apis and provides many enterprise-friendly features out of the box. SparkJava (don't confuse with Apache Spark) is a very lightweight Sinatra/Flask-like framework using Java 8 features, and good for REST apis too. 2 more to consider IMHO: Vert.x, and Comsat from Parallel Universe. Parallel Universe have one of the most interesting technologies in Java-land IMO. They provide a library called Quasar that adds suspendable green threads (similar to Erlang processes) to your code using bytecode instrumentation. This allows a single server to handled a huge number (think 00,000s) of concurrent connections. Vert.x has support for Quasar too. I'm sure others have favourites too. https://www.playframework.com/ https://www.playframework.com/ http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/ http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/ http://www.dropwizard.io/0.9.3/docs/ http://www.dropwizard.io/0.9.3/docs/ http://sparkjava.com/ http://sparkjava.com/ http://vertx.io/ http://vertx.io/ http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/comsat/ http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/comsat/
- FuNe 10y ago
  Also http://www.ninjaframework.org/ http://www.ninjaframework.org/
- stickfigure 10y ago
  http://gwizard.org/ http://gwizard.org/
Yhippa 10y ago
https://jhipster.github.io https://jhipster.github.io It's actually based on Spring Boot.

geodel 10y ago

Java EE is described by some as old, heavy, over engineered technology as opposed to Java SE + simple servlet containers with some Spring or other 'lightweight' frameworks. However in my opinion there is something about Java/Java designers at Sun/Oracle/IBM that lead to over designed APIs and code. Looking at just Java servlet api, it is described in most elaborate manner. It is not about supporting Http Listeners endpoints + some additional features but about any kind of servlets possible for past and future protocols. It is awkward and lacking features for practical Web based applications but still has 74 class just for specifying servlets and no implementation. So arguments about Java SE vs Java EE vs Spring vs Other hot Java framework seems facile to me. Java it self has set the tone to describe things in most elaborate manner, not most succinct manner and anything on top of that more or less follow that tradition.

FuNe 10y ago
My feeling too. I believe it comes from Architecture Astronauting: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html Java/enterprise world is pestered by such guys.
krylon 10y ago
About eight years ... nine years ago, I was between jobs and thought I might use the large amounts of free time I had at my hands to learn something that might improve my chances of finding a new job. Lots of companies use Java EE, right? So I downloaded the JDK, Glassfish and a PDF of a book called "The Java EE tutorial" from Sun. I found it slightly disturbing that Glassfish (or was it JBoss? It was so long ago...) used ~400-450 MB of RAM before I had done anything to it. And then I started reading the so-called tutorial. The fact that it had ~1100 pages should have tipped me of, but it did not frighten me. When I looked and the Table of Contents, however, which came with a freaking flow chart on how to navigate your way through the book depending on what you already knew, I ran away screaming. ;-) And to be fair, in my brief attempt to learn C++ I, too, looked at my first slightly-nontrivial-toy-program when it was finished and found it incredibly over-engineered. So I know how easy it can be to give in to that temptation. Also, there is this old saying that a given piece of software will reflect the organizational structure that created it, if large corporations send hordes of programmers to attack such a problem as creating Java EE or the servlet API, it is not a surprising result. In a way, .Net has the same problem, to a degree. I have not used it much, but one of my first toy programs was an address book that got its data from the Active Directory, and the LDAP API was significantly more complex than, say, Net::LDAP in Perl. Not unusable, but the difference is noteworthy.

sandGorgon 10y ago

Is it fashionable to bash java ? What about https://github.com/graalvm/truffle https://github.com/graalvm/truffle or https://bitbucket.org/allr/fastr/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/allr/fastr/wiki/Home or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUo3BFMwQFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUo3BFMwQFo ? There is serious innovation happening in java land (through Oracle - without talking about Clojure, etc.) Java EE exists because of the need to support large legacy, enterprise customers. For those who are starting out in Java web frameworks, people usually use Spring or Spring Bootstrap (and sometimes the newer Java 8 only http://sparkjava.com/ http://sparkjava.com/).

chvid 10y ago
It has been fashionable to bash java for the past +10 years.
- mohaine 10y ago
  Yes. And Spring is a large part of the of the reason, not the solution. Every time you see somebody making fun of Java for AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean and its like they are actually making fun of Spring, not Java. Btw, that is a real class, not a made up example. http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.0.x/api/org/springframework/aop/framework/AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.html http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.0.x/api/org/sp...
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    again, it is the enterprise market. But then there is spring-boot http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/#quick-start http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/#quick-start

huherto 10y ago

I dislike Oracle as a company. I whish Sun had been acquired by Google instead. But the Java ecosystem is awesome. The language is great, the JVM is great. As long as you know what you are doing.

krylon 10y ago
As far as I remember, Google was not even interested in buying Sun (at least not wholesale). The other company that was engaged in negotiations was IBM, which could have gone either way, I guess, if they had bought Sun.

patrick_vbn 10y ago

Wildfly Swarm (http://wildfly-swarm.io/ http://wildfly-swarm.io/) seems like the exact adaptation the author is looking for. "Swarm offers an innovative approach to packaging and running JavaEE applications by packaging them with just enough of the server runtime to "java -jar" your application."

einrealist 10y ago

Nice post! I have the same opinion. I guess, most people who make a scene about Oracle's stance think that Java EE is the same as the JCP. The JCP will go on and JSRs that are part of EE will continue to evolve. Its just a question of which JSRs still have value in a world of fast changing cloud / compute infrastructures.

dboreham 10y ago

I think that as with many things, you need to follow the money: Someone has to pay for the talented and expensive people needed to develop, maintain and extend a language/ecosystem ("community" does not == free of cost). It isn't obvious to me what the underlying motivation would be to drive the investment required. For Swift/C#/Golang it seems to be roughly "Platform Entrenchment" or perhaps "if not this then we're owned by $otherbigco". Oracle doesn't really have a platform to entrench these days.

kol 10y ago

The wait is over, here is Oracle's official response to the rumors: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/not-dead-yet-oracle-promises-big-plans-for-java-ee/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/not-de...

niftich 10y ago

The author's recommendations are: > 1. Drop the profiles. They are useless and pointless waste of time. This is true, but profiles exist mostly for the benefit of vendors, not developers. Developers only care about modularity, see #2. > 2. Make Java EE a conglomeration of technologies that are known to work together (i.e. JPA, JTA, JMS), but don't force their full installation. Let the use pick and choose what they want. Just be sure that they work together in pieces or in totality. You can do this today, if you use good implementations for those APIs (JMS, JPA) > 3. Make it modular. Start with zero and let people add what they want to use. Same as #2, plus Jigsaw. > 4. Get rid of the tree class loader. You need it matrix based. OSGi is fine. Jigsaw is fine. But it needs to have classes that can be loaded and unloaded without an impact on the container. > 5. The container itself should be a thin shell with remote capabilities (again OSGi/Karaf looks really good here) The OSGi spec gets a bad rep for complexity, but it actually solves a hard problem. Karaf's default UI, on the other hand, is terrible. > 6. Make it cloud friendly. Microservices needs to be core functionality, lightweight, and run in the cloud. Uhh, it's pretty cloud friendly now. Not sure what the author wants here. Ultimately the author says, if you're invested in the Java EE ecosystem, you can't rely on Oracle to move it forward, but you shouldn't let their inaction lead to your inaction. However, due to IP reasons and a perceived past overengineering, the community has nearly given up on Java EE and focuses on Java SE instead. This means that they've adopted points #1, #2, #3 and #6, and are actually moving the ecosystem forward, just piecewise and no longer under the 'Java EE' name.