Why then, if Java is such a miserable platform to develop on would Heroku bother ?

Here are a couple of thoughts :

1. Huge Developer Base

2. Massive Adoption

3. Large, Active Ecosystem

Only Java gives developers such a broad range of tools, technologies and APIs – both commercial and open source. Only Java gives you Open Standard enterprisey features like Transactions, Object Persistence, Messaging, Security, Integration, scalability and high availability for when you need them.

Basically, most professional developers use Java (if they aren’t beholden to Microsoft that is) and they, to a degree, decide how to spend money on deployment and long-term care and feeding of applications. And Heroku, like any other company wants to make money.

But why would a professional Java developer choose Heroku given their very out of date and poorly informed opinion of Java ?

Surely – Red Hat’s OpenShift is a better choice ? Instead of whining about Java’s shortcomings over the years – Red Hat / JBoss has put a huge amount of energy in fixing Java’s shortcomings – and doing it in an open and collaborative way so the entire ecosystem can benefit. Red Hat has a deep understanding of Java technology and open collaboration – more than anyone else in the industry. OpenShift’s support for Java EE 6 is a recent example of this – we didn’t sit around complaining that Java EE didn’t fit with the new deployment paradigm that PaaS represents – we simply did what we had to do to make it work. And you can try it for free.

Finally, as Isaac makes clear, it’s time for the folks at Heroku to wise up about Java and maybe trade in their 2004 copy of “Beginning J2EE 1.4: From Novice to Professional” and have a look at some of the advancements in Enterprise Java over the last decade. Hey – Adam – leave a comment and I’ll buy you a new book

You probably didn’t see Red Hat’s press release as those things are typically only read by the press so I wanted to draw to you attention a single paragraph :

“JBoss Application Server 7 represents a major milestone in the evolution of Java application servers from complex and monolithic to more lightweight, modular and agile. This release will enable developers to re-think how they develop and deploy enterprise Java applications.”

I wrote that and I meant it. Over the last 5 years there has been a significant difference between the Java EE servers like JBoss, Weblogic and Websphere and Apache Tomcat. Tomcat has been the poster-child for the lightweight container movement (but we shouldn’t forget Jetty and Resin – both very capable servers) and has established itself as probably the most popular Java run-time.

But I think we’re at the point where there is no-longer a lightweight division between Java EE servers and Tomcat (and other Web Containers) – some good blog posts here and here that discuss typical developer requirements like startup time and deployment speed (make sure you read the comments). When we’re at the the point where we’re discussing sub-second differences between startup or deployment times then I think we have convergence. I think we’re at a point where you can no longer paint Java EE servers into the big, slow and heavy corner and Tomcat into the lean and fast corner.

Developers have more choice today than ever before – they can choose a lightweight container but no longer have to make a tradeoff between footprint and features. Or start with a basic server like Tomcat and incrementally build a full featured application server from the ground up as more features like caching, persistence, transactions, messaging, view layer are required.

OK before the Glassfish fanboys chime in – yes Glassfish did a great job of addressing light-weight needs for Java EE some time ago but by any available measure Glassfish still doesn’t represent a mainstream choice like Tomcat, JBoss, Weblogic or Websphere.

The mistake that people make (Mike included) is that vanilla Tomcat addresses the full spectrum of enterprise web / app platforms. It simply doesn’t. There is only a small class of applications that need nothing more than a servlet container. The vast majority of Tomcat deployments require a whole bunch of additional technology – the de-facto Tomcat stack is Tomcat + some view layer tech. (eg. Spring MVC) + some persistence / ORM (eg. Hibernate). That is the basis for the alternative to Java EE. Most people end up adding a lot more stuff than that and find themselves somewhat accidentally maintaining a full featured application server. I know of customers who have been very successful doing this; they’ve invested in very knowledgeable people to manage the stack; I’ve also seen customers fail or simply decide that they aren’t willing to become an app. server vendor.

Finally, full disclosure – I do work for one of the vendors Mike mentions – specifically Red Hat and we would be delighted to sell you a subscription to a full featured Java EE Application Server (and a broad range of middleware) but if you have chosen Tomcat – we can help you with that too – we provide a distribution of Tomcat and even certify and test other elements of the Tomcat stack like Hibernate and Spring. Or as most customers actually demand – we can help you with both.

Just 6 months after JBoss AS 6 was released, JBoss AS 7 (codename Lightning) is now available. Congratulations and a big thank you to the JBoss AS team and community. JBoss AS 7 is a major release in every respect and will become the technology underpinning for much of what we do at JBoss for the next decade. I believe it also represents a shift in the way developers will think about enterprise Java and it opens up new possibilities for deployment that were unthinkable 5 years ago due to technical and economic limitations.

If you’ve been following the AS 7 candidate releases (and AS 6 before it) then you already know that AS 7 includes some significant new features. I’m not going to list them all; but here are the highlights:

Developer Productivity

• Startup-time and memory utilization have been significantly reduced which leads to a much more productive developer experience – no more coffee breaks during deployments and restarts.This required some significant rethinking and a fair amount of innovation (something we’re good at apparently)
• The Java EE 6 Web Profile provides a much leaner, less complex platform for developers who focus purely on the web-tier – less to learn, fewer design choices – increased developer productivity
• More flexible and powerful modular classloader – less time debugging and configuring classpaths; more time writing applications
• Testable by Design with Arquillian with out of container testing for the business logic so developers can be more productive while delivering better quality applications.

Price / Performance

• It’s probably a little early to claim significant performance gain over the competition right now but request path performance is a goal and the hard work of tuning and performance improvements starts now, One early indicator will hopeful give you a sense of what we’d like to achieve is the recent SPECjms2007 submission from Red Hat. SPECjms is a pretty narrowly focussed benchmark and not all the JMS vendors are represented, that said this is pretty significant for us as it is the first public benchmark submission from JBoss and good practice for future activities

Operational Ease of Use

• Some of the more significant advances in JBoss AS 7 are around the operational ease of use. The configuration has been completely refactored around a multi-node domain model, though the simple single-instance view has been maintained for developer use as well
• There are stable, easy to use management APIs – so AS 7 deployments can be completely automated from Java or any other scripting environment.
• New shiny, task oriented domain console that also allows you to manage multiple, distributed nodes.

Anyway – time to stop reading and start playing : learn more about JBoss AS 7 here and get the bits here and provide feedback on community site.

Next post – how AS 7 relates to Red Hat’s commercial, fully supported distribution – JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.

So after a fast sprint JBoss AS 6 was released at the end of the year and it passes the Java EE 6 (Web Profile) TCK. It’s great to see the culmination of efforts from fellow Red Hatters that went into this release. But Red Hat’s involvement in the future of Enteprise Java goes way beyond this release – many of the technologies delivered in AS 6 as part of Java EE 6 were driven through the JCP by people like Gavin King, Emmanuelle Bernard, Pete Muir and Jason Greene to name a few. Work on these specifications started several years ago so for some this has been anything but a sprint.

It’s great to see the release cadence of JBoss AS pick up – AS 6 had a number of milestone releases over the year’s development and I think this has gone down pretty well judging from the download rate (about 200k even before GA).

While AS 6 has been going through the last stages in the development and certification cycle, the next major release – AS 7 has already released an early alpha to demonstrate it’s “lean by default” services architecture – the feedback so far seems to be very positive.

You can read more about AS 6 from Stan, Gavin, Shelley, Jaikiran and Dimitris as well as J-Development,  InfoQ and NetworkWorld.

Another day, another survey – this one from Tools Vendor ZeroTurnaround. From what I can tell survey participants were self-selected – but the results underline what has been a solid trend over the last several years and I’ve seen the same in internal surveys I’ve commissioned.

Below is the 2009 / 2010 Container Popularity chart. Note the significant decline of Websphere and Weblogic and the growth in leaner, Open Source containers like JBoss, Jetty and Tomcat.

Glassfish bucked this trend – likely due to uncertainty about it’s future under it’s new owner Oracle. JBoss showed only a little growth – I’ll put this down to a fairly slow year in 2010. But 2011 is going to be very, very different. We already have a Java EE 6 Web Profile container (released last week) and JBoss AS 7 is taking shape pretty rapidly. With our increased attention to slimming the footprint and increasing the speed of adopting new technology and standards like Java EE 6 — my prediction is that JBoss will catch or overtake Tomcat in the next year.

Mike makes some valid points but to claim that Java is a dead-end is a bit sensationalist. By Forrester’s own data – it’s the only mainstream tech. that’s showed sustained growth over the last couple of years – I’m fairly sure 2010 data will continue the same trend.

Sure, Java has it’s limitations and it’s continued commitment to compatibility has hindered its ability to meet new needs but there still really is no better alternative. While Ruby, Scala, Groovy, etc. are compelling for some applications they would need unprecedented sustained growth before they become real main-stream alternatives to Java or .NET. During that adoption ramp they will no-doubt expand to meet additional requirements and their simplicity will be compromised.

These things move at glacial paces – I still meet with customers who are only just starting out with Java. It’s important not to be biased by what the alpha-geeks are looking for – it’s the late majority that provide the momentum.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they produce lame marketing videos, then you win.”

- with apologies to the late Mahatma Gandhi.

Actually, I’d say if your competitors are producing videos at the rate that the Websphere marketing team are producing them about JBoss I think you can safely conclude that they’ve given up all hope competing with products and technology. The latest almost makes me feel a little embarrassed for the Websphere team. How the mighty have fallen.

Replay Solutions just published a survey about Java Platform usage. The questioning, subsequent analysis and presentation of the results was poor IMO. But they did one thing right – they provided the raw data. Thanks for that.

There’s a posting on TSS entitled “Why is JBoss at the bottom of this list ???”. In typical TSS style – few people actually bothered to read the survey results or question them and a long and rather pointless thread ensues. This post is an expansion of my comment at the end of the TSS thread.

The original report has this chart :

Update – Sunday 4/11/10

My initial (very quick) analysis was wrong. My formula for searching for different categories had a basic reg-ex flaw so I was over-counting JBoss by fair bit. I’ve fixed that mistake (spreadsheet here) and also removed duplicates (responses with both “JB + TC” and “Tomcat” or “JBoss” – I’d already admitted to this minor double counting (in the comments) – the original author’s analysis still includes this error.

So the ranking is now the same as the original author’s but the %’s are different. My apologies to IBM for originally stealing their #2 spot By the way – Red Hat fully supports both Tomcat and JBoss AS – so #1 and #3 rankings and being able to satisfy 87% of the market isn’t such a bad result for us.

[As percentages of respondents - that's : Tomcat = 59%, Websphere = 39%, JBoss = 28%, Weblogic = 23%, Other = 19%]

These rankings (WAS above JBoss) are more representative of larger organizations (where both WAS and WLS have traditionally been stronger) – the latest Eclipse survey shows a similar break-out. Unlike the Eclipse survey – this survey doesn’t have any information on the respondents and they seem to be largely self-selected.

My original points still stand – poor questioning, poor analysis and presentation are common in these kinds of surveys. Always ask for the source data !

The JBoss team is expanding again – we’re looking to fill four PM / PMM roles – strong preference for location is Greater Boston (Westford, MA) :

Product Manager – Application Platforms

Product Marketing Manager – Middleware

Solutions Marketing Manager – Middleware

Technical Marketing Manager – Middleware

Submit your resume online via the above links and ping me if we’ve worked together in the past.