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Some quick news and views

I was completely taken back by the promotion by Tech Beacon: 39 Java experts that you should follow on Twitter. I have found in this industry especially that credit is rarely given, and if you luckily enough to be at the stage of life that someone else awards you with a gift then it is indeed a wonderful sunny day. It is honour and proof of your achievement. I so accept humbly with gratitude.

This year will not be attending JavaOne 2016 #1 and therefore I will miss the announcement about the future direction of Java EE 8. Oracle has announced an about-face and intends to move Java EE to the cloud and closer to Micro / Service Oriented Architecture [M/SOA]. As I will be in England, I just wonder how much Oracle will change the sailing direction of the umbrella specification juggernaut. On the one hand, it is a really positive that Oracle finally acknowledges the desire for embedded containers, uber-JARs and the push for containerisation. On the other hand, the specification will suffer a delay and at the time of writing, the length of it is an unknown.

I have questioned whether standards are really the place for innovation. In this case, which libraries and frameworks are the de-facto leaders taking Java EE to the cloud platform?

In 2004, if I was considering Object Relational Mapping solution, I would have told you Hibernate. In 2016, if the question is taking a WAR file and deploying to a cloud platform, then you could choose many vendor specific ways. The point is that there is no clear standard or methodology, albeit all we do know for sure is that Oracle has been quietly working on a solution for about 6 or 7 months.

At the early stages of the development for Java EE 7, Oracle #2 wanted to standardise a cloud deployment strategy. The Executive Group abandoned the effort, because they thought moving to the cloud would severely delay the JSR and also the, then, solutions were in rapid state of flux, immature with no clear leaders.

You might say that there is the Micro-Profile effort and collaboration between well-known vendors, individuals and user groups. This initiative has only just started since June and has yet to make its mark. It is a very young and weak, because only JAX-RS, CDI and JSON-P are considered as requirements. Microprofile #3 has to catch fire and grow significantly in comparison with say Spring Boot. I could not yet convince an IT director about the benefits of the Microprofile as the next investment technology. Some detractors have said the Micoprofile initiative is muddying the waters around standardisation and Oracle is responsible for the mess. However, the big positive about the Microprofile was that it probably made top Oracle Java managers sit up and notice the upset in the community.

The year 2016 will be remembered for the higher than normal obituaries of famous global celebrities like Prince, Harper Lee, Muhammad Ali, David Bowie etc. For a while, 2016 sounded like death-knell for Java EE and we did believe the eco-system was in crisis, and I can tell you factually there are many hurting Java Champions and other well-known community leaders who are odds with the way Oracle has behaved with Java EE and other projects like NetBeans Rich Client Platform. I will allow them to exhort by themselves how they will feel whenever they want to. My motive here is report that it will take time to heal the frustration. At this point, all we can do is wait, because our hands are effectively bound. At least, we can respond to at least three different Java EE related surveys #4, which definitely illustrates the lack of power of the development community.

+PP+