Mark Little has an interesting article on InfoQ looking at what’s going on with Java EE and microservices. At the beginning of this year I looked at a number of Java frameworks that are emerging that support microservice development and deployment. What’s interesting is everyone has a slightly different take on what parts of the EE apis they would take with them, and/or how a Java based microservice should be packaged and deployed.
What I find interesting is there’s obviously a general agreement that there’s still parts of EE that are beneficial and useful for microservice development and deployment, but from a distance the activity in this space looks like vultures picking apart the carcass of Java EE.
While there’s still benefit for some to develop monolithic enterprise systems using Java EE and traditional app servers ‘in the traditional way’ as we have done for for the past 15 years or so, it’s interesting that microservices seems to be questioning the EE approach of all your apis in a bucket provided by a single app server. I rather like the JBoss Swarm approach of being able to pick the apis you want and just bundle/deploy a fat War with what you need. I wonder if there’s enough interest and/or momentum in this space that we might see EE (probably too late for EE8, but EE9?) start to embrace this different approach to building apps as many smaller, individual services, and directly offer support for microservices type approach in future EE versions?