Architecting Modern Java EE Applications: Designing lightweight, business-oriented enterprise applications in the age of cloud, containers, and Java EE 8

617 Pages·02.959 MB·English

by  Sebastian Daschner

Architecting Modern Java EE Applications

Designing lightweight, business-oriented enterprise applications in the age of cloud,
containers, and Java EE 8

Sebastian Daschner
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Architecting Modern Java EE
Applications

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First published: October 2017
Production reference: 1051017
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78839-385-0
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Credits
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Foreword
Languages in our industry come and go, and the pace at which hip new languages
come out only seems to increase. Every year, new languages come out and each has
the colossal job of building an entire ecosystem around itself before the next new
darling language comes and steals all the fickle early adopters. As each trend waxes
and wanes, so do the ecosystems built around them.
Those of us who invest heavily in these trending ecosystems are often bitten by a
common set of problems that lead to failures at the business level, losing project
momentum due to the inability to find and hire developers. The new solutions
presented are often the same old idea, but with a youthful misunderstanding of the
problem space that leads to real performance and reliability problems. As the
ecosystem matures, the act of recognizing and realigning to the true complexity of
systems often results in severe incompatibilities. Tooling choices are often narrow or
buggy, or they simply never materialize.
The unbeatable source of strength of the Java ecosystem over the last 20 years has
been its standards, Java EE being chief among them. There have been 53 Java
Specification Requests (JSRs) completed under the Java EE umbrella, ranging from
XML parsing to JSON parsing, Servlets to JAX-RS, binary protocols to RESTful
protocols, front-end technologies such as JSF or MVC, APIs for marshaling data to
XML (JAX-B) or JSON (JSON-B) . The breadth of specifications is so wide that
even if you do not think of yourself as a Java EE user, if you are a Java developer,
you are definitely leveraging it in some way. With an estimate of 9 million Java
developers worldwide, this is a stable and experienced talent pool.
Major deployments of Java EE range from Walmart, the world's largest retailer and
third largest employer, to NASA’s SOFIA program, scanning space at 40,000 feet.
While the developer community is large and the corporations that use it are larger,
the modern Java EE runtimes are incredibly small. Walmart and NASA, for
example, use Apache TomEE, an implementation that is 35 MB on disk, boots in a
second and consumes less that 30 MB of memory. This low profile is indicative of
all modern implementations including WildFly, Payara, and LibertyProfile. The Java
EE tools, cloud and IDE landscape is filled with competitive choices, almost too
many to track. The 200+ person company ZeroTurnaround, for example, is built on a
product that added instant deploy options to Java EE servers.
With such an expansive ecosystem that has almost 20 years of history, truly getting
to the essence of what makes Java EE great today and how to put it into practice for
today’s Microservices world can be a challenge. It’s all too easy to find very
informed, but ultimately dated information from 2, 5, and 10 years back. The
authoritative tone of one article one date can directly conflict with equally
authoritative, but ultimately contrarian perspective of another author on a different
year. In fact, a challenge almost unique to Java EE is its history. Few technologies
last long enough and evolve so much.
This book, like the author himself, represents a new generation of Java EE. The
chapters in this book guide the reader through the journey of leveraging Java EE in
the context of today’s Microservice and Containerized world. Less of a reference
manual for API syntax, the perspectives and techniques in this book reflect real-
world experience from someone who has recently gone through the journey
themselves, meticulously annotated the obstacles, and has them ready to share. From
packaging to testing to cloud usage, this book is an ideal companion to both new and
more experienced developers who are looking for an earned insight bigger than an
API to help them realign their thinking to architect modern applications in Java EE.

David Blevins
Founder and CEO, Tomitribe
About the Author
Sebastian Daschner is a Java freelancer working as a consultant and trainer and is
enthusiastic about programming and Java (EE). He participates in the JCP, helping to
form future Java EE standards, serving in the JSR 370 and 374 Expert Groups, and
collaborating on various open source projects. For his contributions to the Java
community and ecosystem, he was recognized with the titles Java Champion and
Oracle Developer Champion.
Sebastian is a regular speaker at international IT conferences, such as JavaLand,
JavaOne, and Jfokus. He won the JavaOne Rockstar award at JavaOne 2016.
Together with Java community manager, Steve Chin, he has traveled to dozens of
conferences and Java User Groups on motorbike. Steve and Sebastian have launched
JOnsen, a Java unconference held at a hot spring in the countryside of Japan.