4 ms·

Thank you. If I had a dime for every time I've uttered, how is this easier or more efficient than "deploy war", over the past 5-7 years I'd be a very wealthy ma

Thank you. If I had a dime for every time I've uttered, how is this easier or more efficient than "deploy war", over the past 5-7 years I'd be a very wealthy man.

acdha 5y ago
To me, it really comes back to how badly the Java system was managed with regard to the quality of its tools. Portability and security would always have been a draw for every other language but even the Java projects I know used containers for basically two reasons: Tomcat was unrewarding to use and the Java web stack had a lot of complexity which users were forced to deal with. If Sun had spent, say, 5% of their marketing budget on making the user experience better I don't think there would have been anywhere near the pressure to avoid it.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Somehow I get the feeling that most Java haters never had the pleasure to deal with CORBA and COM/DCOM or MTS. So those newcomers never got the point why many of us actually enjoyed using Application Servers.
  - acdha 5y ago
    I did, actually, have the misfortune of using COM (and touched CORBA enough not to want to use it more). I don’t hate Java but, having started using it in 1995, it felt like the community was prone to sweeping ambitions which exceeded the available time or appetite to improve further. One challenge is that while doing everything yourself allows the most control, it also means that improvements only come from within the smaller community of Java users.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Well I wouldn't call that community small, given that it grew to overtake C++ on enterprise distributed computing.
      - acdha 5y ago
        It's definitely not small but it's a subset of the entire development community. That's not wrong – maybe it allows iterating faster without supporting other languages, for example — but it can also reduce the number of people interested in working on something. Just as a simple example, a Python user can benefit to an improvement in Apache httpd made by a Java, C, PHP, etc. shop but that happens a lot less frequently with Tomcat.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        That Python user can benefit from Jython and GraalVM.
        acdha 5y ago
        Kind of, but in practice they probably aren't going to use those unless they're already committed to the Java world because they're slower, less compatible with the extensions they're probably using, and fewer people use them so you're more likely to find bugs or gaps in documentation. Again, I'm not saying that Java is terrible or that nobody uses it but simply that the community is smaller than the entire tech world — especially after Oracle's sales pressure — and that means that any given project has a greater chance of not having enough support unless a major company backs it.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Each community is tiny when measured against the whole tech world, not really getting the point. A C++ shop couldn't care less about what a Swift shop is doing and so forth.
        acdha 5y ago
        The point being that Java-specific things like WARs, Tomcat, etc. were almost exclusively used by Java shops whereas more general tools such as httpd are used across multiple communities. A C++ shop can host their app behind httpd/nginx/etc. the same as a Swift shop even if they don't otherwise use the same tools.
  - hedora 5y ago
    My first job involved CORBA in Java. Tomcat was better, I guess.
hedora 5y ago
Well, for one thing, Docker Hub now has a helpful web badge telling you whether or not each container contains a vulnerable copy of log4j. I'm not sure why it's taking the J2EE containers so much longer to patch than the good 'ol PHP stuff or shiny new Go apps. /s
- acdha 5y ago
  > I'm not sure why it's taking the J2EE containers so much longer to patch than the good 'ol PHP stuff or shiny new Go apps. I was wondering what it'd look like if they used these badges for every language. Maybe like 5% of the outside containers I look at don't have significant unpatched CVEs, even for relatively popular projects.

Thank you. If I had a dime for every time I've uttered, how is this easier or more efficient than "deploy war", over the past 5-7 years I'd be a very wealthy man.

acdha 5y ago

To me, it really comes back to how badly the Java system was managed with regard to the quality of its tools. Portability and security would always have been a draw for every other language but even the Java projects I know used containers for basically two reasons: Tomcat was unrewarding to use and the Java web stack had a lot of complexity which users were forced to deal with. If Sun had spent, say, 5% of their marketing budget on making the user experience better I don't think there would have been anywhere near the pressure to avoid it.

pjmlp 5y ago
Somehow I get the feeling that most Java haters never had the pleasure to deal with CORBA and COM/DCOM or MTS. So those newcomers never got the point why many of us actually enjoyed using Application Servers.
- acdha 5y ago
  I did, actually, have the misfortune of using COM (and touched CORBA enough not to want to use it more). I don’t hate Java but, having started using it in 1995, it felt like the community was prone to sweeping ambitions which exceeded the available time or appetite to improve further. One challenge is that while doing everything yourself allows the most control, it also means that improvements only come from within the smaller community of Java users.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Well I wouldn't call that community small, given that it grew to overtake C++ on enterprise distributed computing.
    - acdha 5y ago
      It's definitely not small but it's a subset of the entire development community. That's not wrong – maybe it allows iterating faster without supporting other languages, for example — but it can also reduce the number of people interested in working on something. Just as a simple example, a Python user can benefit to an improvement in Apache httpd made by a Java, C, PHP, etc. shop but that happens a lot less frequently with Tomcat.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        That Python user can benefit from Jython and GraalVM.
        acdha 5y ago
        Kind of, but in practice they probably aren't going to use those unless they're already committed to the Java world because they're slower, less compatible with the extensions they're probably using, and fewer people use them so you're more likely to find bugs or gaps in documentation. Again, I'm not saying that Java is terrible or that nobody uses it but simply that the community is smaller than the entire tech world — especially after Oracle's sales pressure — and that means that any given project has a greater chance of not having enough support unless a major company backs it.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Each community is tiny when measured against the whole tech world, not really getting the point. A C++ shop couldn't care less about what a Swift shop is doing and so forth.
        acdha 5y ago
        The point being that Java-specific things like WARs, Tomcat, etc. were almost exclusively used by Java shops whereas more general tools such as httpd are used across multiple communities. A C++ shop can host their app behind httpd/nginx/etc. the same as a Swift shop even if they don't otherwise use the same tools.
- hedora 5y ago
  My first job involved CORBA in Java. Tomcat was better, I guess.

hedora 5y ago

Well, for one thing, Docker Hub now has a helpful web badge telling you whether or not each container contains a vulnerable copy of log4j. I'm not sure why it's taking the J2EE containers so much longer to patch than the good 'ol PHP stuff or shiny new Go apps. /s

acdha 5y ago
> I'm not sure why it's taking the J2EE containers so much longer to patch than the good 'ol PHP stuff or shiny new Go apps. I was wondering what it'd look like if they used these badges for every language. Maybe like 5% of the outside containers I look at don't have significant unpatched CVEs, even for relatively popular projects.