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> If you want high-performance web services with much more powerful backing technologies (EJB, JPA, JMS...) without locking into a particular haphazard collecti

> If you want high-performance web services with much more powerful backing technologies (EJB, JPA, JMS...) without locking into a particular haphazard collection of libraries, just write and deploy a JAX-RS module into your free, lightweight app server of choice (Wildfly, Glassfish, etc). The cost of having a choice is having to make a choice. Look at the number of concepts someone coming to the ecosystem totally fresh has to learn here. Not only that, look at the number of choices they have to make without understanding the trade-offs they might be making, or even whether they'll ever have to care. All these things you mention are added cognitive load which, for a large number of applications, will end up being totally irrelevant. Dropwizard looks to me like a solid 80/20 solution. Think of all the apps out there which get deployed to tomcat, are the only thing which will ever be deployed to that tomcat instance, and just never have to grow past a single machine, or even a single developer. What value is tomcat (or glassfish, or whatever) actually adding in that situation? I'd argue that it's pure overhead. An in-process HTTP server running under a classic UNIX process supervisor like runit or daemontools would do just as well. Maybe there are babies being thrown out with the bathwater here, but the way forward isn't to highlight all the extra work a developer has to do to find them.

nbw-hn 12y ago
Glassfish or Wildfly add value when the application uses JavaEE APIs. With a Tomcat or Dropwizard approach you have to piece together a bunch of 3rd party JARs to provide these APIs. You have to maintain this etc. With the app server the libraries are already bundled in there. Sure there may be more then you end up using but come one we are talking 10s of MBs here which in this day and age is nothing for most environments. Also startup times with these App servers aren't affected because they only startup the containers which are used by your application. My Glassfish instances start up in around 2ms with an app that uses JPA, Servlet, JAX-RS, EJB. I'd rather spend my time building the app and not spend time piecing together my Tomcat environment.

nbw-hn 12y ago

Glassfish or Wildfly add value when the application uses JavaEE APIs. With a Tomcat or Dropwizard approach you have to piece together a bunch of 3rd party JARs to provide these APIs. You have to maintain this etc. With the app server the libraries are already bundled in there. Sure there may be more then you end up using but come one we are talking 10s of MBs here which in this day and age is nothing for most environments. Also startup times with these App servers aren't affected because they only startup the containers which are used by your application. My Glassfish instances start up in around 2ms with an app that uses JPA, Servlet, JAX-RS, EJB. I'd rather spend my time building the app and not spend time piecing together my Tomcat environment.