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Comment by tieTYT | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to be using Java 8 but I can't because we deploy to an app server. The latest version of the app server has some critical bugs that prevent us from upgrading and we can't use Java 8 until we upgrade. We also can't switch to a different app server because the app server dictates which implementation of JPA you use and we wrote a lot of code tied to the implementation.

This makes me wonder if Java EE app servers have ever been marked as "Hold" on any of the previous ThoughtWorks Tech Radars. I certainly wouldn't recommend them.

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Stories like this really make the case for open source app servers for me. The breadth of functionality they offer is so wide that when something does go wrong not only is it way easier to debug the issue and find out whether your code or the application server is at fault but also once you found the issue you can actually fix it yourself.

We run a custom patch set against our application server (which we contribute upstream) and I couldn't imagine using a closed source app server. We have other teams that work with closed source app servers and they really envy us.

We are using an open source app server: Glassfish.

Can't you just backport the Java 8 fixes and build from source?

I haven't researched it, but I figure if the glassfish developers themselves aren't willing to put in the effort, it must be a big effort.

You never know.

The enterprise loves J2EE, given the tooling they provide to manage resources, application deployment and monitor usage.

For them to go on hold, Java needs to go on hold on the enterprise.

At least on context of the enterprise, I very much doubt they will ever go away. Only as a side effect of the said companies replacing languages.

Just like CORBA only went away, as the same type of companies moved from C++ to Java/.NET ecosystems.

Java EE 7 web profile is pretty light. If you consider they put JSF on hold then it points to other bits of Java EE that are probably persistent:

Java EE Web profile, hibernate (via JPA), JAX-RS. That's a pretty good stack.

No JSF, servlets, JSP or EJB and it's all good.

As for Java 8 and containers, what are your issues? Just interested.

I would think that such app servers would fall under the "the big enterprise solutions" that is "on hold" in this radar.

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