… and the rise of the lightweight, agile, dynamic, modular Enterprise Java.
Java EE has long had the perception of being slow, bloated and monolithic. While the Java EE specification doesn’t prescribe a lightweight, modular implementation; neither does it preclude one. So the negative perception of Java EE is more to do with certain implementations than the standard itself. The two dominant commercial vendors of (Oracle and IBM) have, over the last 10 years, done a lot to re-enforce the perception that Java EE has to be complex, bloated and expensive. While at JBoss we’ve been pushing in a different direction for many years. Each of the last major release of JBoss AS has incrementally pushed modularity closer to an ideal where you only pay for what you need (in memory, complexity, CPU).
Photo Credit : “Junk in The Trunk”, zappowbang (CC, some rights reserved)
The latest version (JBoss AS 7) – which is also the underlying technology for Red Hat’s commercially supported product (JBoss EAP 6) has pushed the lightweight theme as far as to completely erode the difference between lightweight web containers (like Tomcat) and “heavyweight EE servers”. As far back as 2008 (through the advances in mobile devices and JBoss miniaturization) it’s been possible to run a full Java EE server on something as small as a smartphone; last year at Red Hat summit we ran the entire JBoss keynote demo (starts about 35min) on a cluster of cheap plug-top computers (far less powerful than today’s smartphone).
So it’s great to see IBM following our lead and pulling their own miniaturization stunt – Websphere running on a Rasberry Pi – very cool. Great to see IBM joining us to help change the perception of Java EE.
Rich Sharples' Weblog 