7 ms·

Abandon fish! Leaving GlassFish for TomEE or JBoss

37 points by theotown 13y ago

gjvc 13y ago
see also Resin, which has a GPL version http://www.caucho.com/ http://www.caucho.com/
twic 13y ago
I am a little surprised to see an article like this on HN. I wouldn't have thought the kind of person who reads HN uses anything as fusty as a Java EE application server. Am i mistaken? How many of us are using Java EE? Is it just those of us who are toiling away in the code mines of megacorps? Or are some of us using Java EE in cool and exciting startups?
- rpeden 13y ago
  I'll bet a lot of startups are using parts of it. Servlets and JPA are both part of Java EE, and I've worked at a startup that used at least those parts of the EE stack. Any startup that uses Grails is using Java EE, albeit indirectly.
  - wil421 13y ago
    >Is it just those of us who are toiling away in the code mines of megacorps? Code miner here, can confirm we operate Java EE servers but I have never known anyone to use Glassfish, its always that bundled server I download yet never use. We use mostly weblogic and tomcat, there may be a few JBoss app servers somewhere too.
  - stonemetal 13y ago
    Clojure's Immutant is built on top of JBoss so you are indirectly using Java EE there too.
    - twic 13y ago
      And there's TorqueBox for Ruby on or off Rails: http://torquebox.org/ http://torquebox.org/
      - Edmond 13y ago
        speaking of ruby-off-rails, you may be interested in crudzilla.com, a web app platform for the jvm.
- fecak 13y ago
  Articles about Java don't usually do well on HN, and something about Glassfish (which never had any significant adoption whatsoever) getting any votes surprises me. I've run a JUG fir 14 years, and most of my membership these days is from larger companies. The startup crowd is a small minority now, but years ago was at least 50% of my membership.
- vutekst 13y ago
  Some of us toil away in the mines using Java EE (and even Glassfish in production, in my case) but read HN because we dream of a better life.
  - UK-AL 13y ago
    I'm startups, and dream of the opposite.
    - smacktoward 13y ago
      The grass is always greener, etc.
      - twic 13y ago
        This was one of the advantages of the old IBM mainframe ecosystem: there was only one shade of green, and that was blue.
- pgsandstrom 13y ago
  My small experience from working with startups was that a LOT of java EE was used. This most likely came from them needing cheap labor, and many programmers fresh from school only knew java. I don't know if those startups qualified as 'cool and exciting' though.
  - fecak 13y ago
    I would guess that your startup experience wasn't all that recent? I'd say Java has been somewhat out of favor with most startups, at least in my area, for at least the past 5-7 years.
    - pgsandstrom 13y ago
      It was about 2-4 years ago. However, I was only in touch with a handful of companies. Still, my experience is that the continuous strength of java is that "everybody" knows it. Especially if the founder is not from a technical background, I think it is easy for a company to get stuck with programmers that only knows java.
- cs02rm0 13y ago
  I'm still toiling away in the mines, but when my current contract runs out next month Java EE I expect will still be invaluable. (Wildfly, not Glassfish though).
- Nanzikambe 13y ago
  I used it extensively, I wrote a suite of web based tools for an MMO with GF 3.12, at the time I started writing I had good familiarity with Java, but none-with J2EE technologies, REST, JSON etc. Whilst I implemented what I set out to do, when the time came to implement a significant ammount of new features, one thing that amazed me was the labyrinth of code that I'd had to create (beans, resources, factories, abstract base classes) - and how quickly it was becoming a major chore to change the trivialest of things. Also I made the unfortunate mistake of using JavaDB/Derby as the datastore, thinking I had no need for a full RDBMS, I'll never make that mistake again, it's the most pathetic excuse for a db ever (I've used Oracle, MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL and Sqlite in the past, so I have some perspective on the matter) So I began looking for alternatives, as a result v2 is written in Python (Flask/REST producing JSON, a simple wrapper around TornDB querying a MySQL db) which is consumed and presented by the Javascript/HTML front end using AngularJS. I re-implemented everything V1 had from scratch in under three days and was ready to begin adding the new features. By comparison the initial implementation in Java had taken me several weeks. Obviously some of that is to be expected, its easier to re-write than write. But I come away now feeling that Java & Glassfish made me jump through hoops to accomplish something that should have been simple, and I was certainly guilty of chosing the wrong tool for the job, but Java was what I knew best at the time.
  - Nanzikambe 13y ago
    To add to that, my background before the scenario I describe was as a developer in the banking industry, where Java/J2EE is used very widely and potentially justified for the complexity of the projects.
  - matt_heimer 13y ago
    > how quickly it was becoming a major chore to change the trivialest of things This was more than likely just bad design on your part. GlassFish 3.12 support Java EE 6 which supports a lot of POJO based development - between your mention of abstract base classes, factories, and J2EE (which became Java EE over 8 years ago) I have to wonder if you used a lot of legacy APIs and design patterns. > Also I made the unfortunate mistake of using JavaDB/Derby as the datastore Derby is neat for an portable in-process relation db but no one in their right mind uses it for a large or high-performance db. But most db changes should be isolated to your persistence layer using Hibernate/JPA so changing database vendors shouldn't have caused a big change in your code unless you had to redesign your tables for some other reason.
- roberto56 13y ago
  I think you're indeed mistaken ;) Java EE had a bad reputation in 2004, being mainly represented by mega corps with their hidden corporate agendas (IBM, BEA, Oracle). Developers weren't being asked what the wanted or needed managers were influenced by sales teams to go with either IBM or BEA. Application servers were at least a 2GB download and easily required a GB of memory to run (this is still a lot in 2014, go figure what this was in 2004). Of course everything was closed source, super expensive (so your company never updated) and servers took a minimum of 5 minutes to boot up. A hello world in the then dominant EJB 2 technology required implementing 3 interfaces, inheriting from a base class, using a special compiler tool to enhance the class another compiler tool to create stubs and needed some 20 lines of XML in an incredibly verbose format to be registered. You didn't need to be a technology export to predict developers didn't really like this tech (understatement of the year). In 2005 Sun made a dramatic turn, and Java EE 5 started focussing on developer demands instead. Meanwhile many open source initiatives started or were getting mature (Sun's GlassFish, JBoss, Apache's Geronimo and recently TomEE). Java EE 6 (2009) and EE 7 (2013) continued this trend. Long story short, completely free and open source servers that start in a second or less and are between 30 and 120MB to download now dominate the market. The APIs have been dramatically simplified and the process of contributing to the platform has been largely opened, making it possible for anyone to create issues, submit patches or discuss the future direction. There's one thorny exception and that's the so-called TCK: a test suite that checks spec compliance is still mostly closed. And yes, there are now hip startups using Java EE, for example http://zeef.com http://zeef.com All in all Java EE has become somewhat of a secret weapon. It's powerful, yet lightweight and quite a lot of people have not (re-)discovered it yet. Especially when combined with Java 8 (due for release next week) it's a very good stack.

37 points by theotown 13y ago

gjvc 13y ago

see also Resin, which has a GPL version http://www.caucho.com/ http://www.caucho.com/

twic 13y ago

I am a little surprised to see an article like this on HN. I wouldn't have thought the kind of person who reads HN uses anything as fusty as a Java EE application server. Am i mistaken? How many of us are using Java EE? Is it just those of us who are toiling away in the code mines of megacorps? Or are some of us using Java EE in cool and exciting startups?

rpeden 13y ago
I'll bet a lot of startups are using parts of it. Servlets and JPA are both part of Java EE, and I've worked at a startup that used at least those parts of the EE stack. Any startup that uses Grails is using Java EE, albeit indirectly.
- wil421 13y ago
  >Is it just those of us who are toiling away in the code mines of megacorps? Code miner here, can confirm we operate Java EE servers but I have never known anyone to use Glassfish, its always that bundled server I download yet never use. We use mostly weblogic and tomcat, there may be a few JBoss app servers somewhere too.
- stonemetal 13y ago
  Clojure's Immutant is built on top of JBoss so you are indirectly using Java EE there too.
  - twic 13y ago
    And there's TorqueBox for Ruby on or off Rails: http://torquebox.org/ http://torquebox.org/
    - Edmond 13y ago
      speaking of ruby-off-rails, you may be interested in crudzilla.com, a web app platform for the jvm.
fecak 13y ago
Articles about Java don't usually do well on HN, and something about Glassfish (which never had any significant adoption whatsoever) getting any votes surprises me. I've run a JUG fir 14 years, and most of my membership these days is from larger companies. The startup crowd is a small minority now, but years ago was at least 50% of my membership.
vutekst 13y ago
Some of us toil away in the mines using Java EE (and even Glassfish in production, in my case) but read HN because we dream of a better life.
- UK-AL 13y ago
  I'm startups, and dream of the opposite.
  - smacktoward 13y ago
    The grass is always greener, etc.
    - twic 13y ago
      This was one of the advantages of the old IBM mainframe ecosystem: there was only one shade of green, and that was blue.
pgsandstrom 13y ago
My small experience from working with startups was that a LOT of java EE was used. This most likely came from them needing cheap labor, and many programmers fresh from school only knew java. I don't know if those startups qualified as 'cool and exciting' though.
- fecak 13y ago
  I would guess that your startup experience wasn't all that recent? I'd say Java has been somewhat out of favor with most startups, at least in my area, for at least the past 5-7 years.
  - pgsandstrom 13y ago
    It was about 2-4 years ago. However, I was only in touch with a handful of companies. Still, my experience is that the continuous strength of java is that "everybody" knows it. Especially if the founder is not from a technical background, I think it is easy for a company to get stuck with programmers that only knows java.
cs02rm0 13y ago
I'm still toiling away in the mines, but when my current contract runs out next month Java EE I expect will still be invaluable. (Wildfly, not Glassfish though).
Nanzikambe 13y ago
I used it extensively, I wrote a suite of web based tools for an MMO with GF 3.12, at the time I started writing I had good familiarity with Java, but none-with J2EE technologies, REST, JSON etc. Whilst I implemented what I set out to do, when the time came to implement a significant ammount of new features, one thing that amazed me was the labyrinth of code that I'd had to create (beans, resources, factories, abstract base classes) - and how quickly it was becoming a major chore to change the trivialest of things. Also I made the unfortunate mistake of using JavaDB/Derby as the datastore, thinking I had no need for a full RDBMS, I'll never make that mistake again, it's the most pathetic excuse for a db ever (I've used Oracle, MSSQL, Sybase, MySQL and Sqlite in the past, so I have some perspective on the matter) So I began looking for alternatives, as a result v2 is written in Python (Flask/REST producing JSON, a simple wrapper around TornDB querying a MySQL db) which is consumed and presented by the Javascript/HTML front end using AngularJS. I re-implemented everything V1 had from scratch in under three days and was ready to begin adding the new features. By comparison the initial implementation in Java had taken me several weeks. Obviously some of that is to be expected, its easier to re-write than write. But I come away now feeling that Java & Glassfish made me jump through hoops to accomplish something that should have been simple, and I was certainly guilty of chosing the wrong tool for the job, but Java was what I knew best at the time.
- Nanzikambe 13y ago
  To add to that, my background before the scenario I describe was as a developer in the banking industry, where Java/J2EE is used very widely and potentially justified for the complexity of the projects.
- matt_heimer 13y ago
  > how quickly it was becoming a major chore to change the trivialest of things This was more than likely just bad design on your part. GlassFish 3.12 support Java EE 6 which supports a lot of POJO based development - between your mention of abstract base classes, factories, and J2EE (which became Java EE over 8 years ago) I have to wonder if you used a lot of legacy APIs and design patterns. > Also I made the unfortunate mistake of using JavaDB/Derby as the datastore Derby is neat for an portable in-process relation db but no one in their right mind uses it for a large or high-performance db. But most db changes should be isolated to your persistence layer using Hibernate/JPA so changing database vendors shouldn't have caused a big change in your code unless you had to redesign your tables for some other reason.
roberto56 13y ago
I think you're indeed mistaken ;) Java EE had a bad reputation in 2004, being mainly represented by mega corps with their hidden corporate agendas (IBM, BEA, Oracle). Developers weren't being asked what the wanted or needed managers were influenced by sales teams to go with either IBM or BEA. Application servers were at least a 2GB download and easily required a GB of memory to run (this is still a lot in 2014, go figure what this was in 2004). Of course everything was closed source, super expensive (so your company never updated) and servers took a minimum of 5 minutes to boot up. A hello world in the then dominant EJB 2 technology required implementing 3 interfaces, inheriting from a base class, using a special compiler tool to enhance the class another compiler tool to create stubs and needed some 20 lines of XML in an incredibly verbose format to be registered. You didn't need to be a technology export to predict developers didn't really like this tech (understatement of the year). In 2005 Sun made a dramatic turn, and Java EE 5 started focussing on developer demands instead. Meanwhile many open source initiatives started or were getting mature (Sun's GlassFish, JBoss, Apache's Geronimo and recently TomEE). Java EE 6 (2009) and EE 7 (2013) continued this trend. Long story short, completely free and open source servers that start in a second or less and are between 30 and 120MB to download now dominate the market. The APIs have been dramatically simplified and the process of contributing to the platform has been largely opened, making it possible for anyone to create issues, submit patches or discuss the future direction. There's one thorny exception and that's the so-called TCK: a test suite that checks spec compliance is still mostly closed. And yes, there are now hip startups using Java EE, for example http://zeef.com http://zeef.com All in all Java EE has become somewhat of a secret weapon. It's powerful, yet lightweight and quite a lot of people have not (re-)discovered it yet. Especially when combined with Java 8 (due for release next week) it's a very good stack.