Announcing Heroku Enterprise for Java | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Heroku Enterprise for Java

blog.heroku.com

64 pointsEmpro13 comments

Sadly I think the OpenJDK will scare off most "Enterprise" developers. I see this as a good option for testing/development but I have never seen an Enterprise use OpenJDK in production. Most are using Oracle's JDK or some other special purpose JDK. And if you can't make it look exactly like production most shops are not going to touch it.

Even "non-enterprise" developers would be scared from OpenJDK... well if they have ever used it anyway.

Any reason why? OpenJDK is the reference implementation of Java 7, so if you are targeting Java 7 why not use it?

There are probably any number of reasons, valid or not. The easiest to cite is "Who do I call if we have a problem with OpenJDK?"

Outside of OpenJDK there are other issues that make this a hard push for Enterprise customers. I haven't seen a large installation that uses memcached. Most go with something that is tailored for Java like Terracotta's bigmemory. Again it is "Who do we call if it breaks?"

Heroku is in an interesting place here I think. They are certainly on the right trail but this is VMWare's back yard now. Being a polyglot platform is probably a disadvantage for Heroku in this arena. If you look at VMWare they have a complete system tailored to work with Java. The hardest hurdle I see is that VMWare's solution can go from developer size deployments to production all on the hardware owned by the Enterprise. Heroku can't do that and I assume will never do that. Not "owning" the entire system will be an uphill battle for a lot of Enterprise customers.

All it appears to be is WAR deployment and memcached session support. If your deploying a WAR switching to embedded tomcat is trivial as is tying memcached/redis to tomcat's session manager. I also don't see how they support adding libraries to tomcat if they control the container, maybe a maven plugin?

If they were going after the 'enterprise' market I would have expected EAR deploys to JBoss or Glassfish.

They are also supporting Java 8, pretty nifty. Exciting news for the Java community.

No. They are OpenJDK. The only use of OpenJDK is to see java programs crash in unexpected ways.

This matches my experience. Eclipse Indigo and Glassfish both love to crash for me on OpenJDK (amd64 ubuntu). When I switch to Oracle's JDK binaries it all works fine.

I looked, but couldn't find any information on max Java heap size, etc.

Glad to see the Heroku updates. It is definitely becoming one of my favorite tools.

Next step, I hope they roll our websockets support.

Still can't find out how much will it cost me. Those pricing "tools" say nothing concrete and measurable to me.

So, like regular Heroku, but more expensive and enterprisey?

Consider it the "invisible hand" of Salesforce.com at work. They have a single-minded focus on Java technology, and they will go after the easy money at the Java shops (they know how to sell these things).

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