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Comment by istvan__ | Hacker News Reader

One business use case is to stop threads between the Ops and the Dev team about missing JAR files on a production system.

If Docker was fixing this only, I would still use it. There is nothing better than a single binary deployment that is byte to byte the same as it was running on a dev laptop and a QA env.

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Do you mean like a war file?

(Yes, I'm being hyperbolic, unless you want to have your entire application running from a servlet container with nothing in front of it. And I agree, a single deployment object is just about the only way to keep your sanity. But still, this isn't the first thing that's proclaimed that advantage.)

No, I do not mean like a war file. I am talking about an average Java developer who does not understand how classpath works, how environment works and what are the assumption that is built in to the code and blames everything on other people . For a long time they could get away with this, post-Docker world they cannot.

Not sure why you still have this problem. In Java world, Maven build system solved this long, long time ago. There is even a plug-in that builds a uber jar that can be invoked with JVM as the only dependency.

I do not have this problem, because I understand this very well. I said, an average Java dev has this problem, that is based on my experience working with Java devs in San Francisco for few years.

Still have problems with Java versions, Java security policies (encryption strength, etc, that you manually have to add files to your JDK/JRE to work), external dependencies, etc.

We use Java, Maven, JBoss + Ear/War deployments. And "Works on my Box" is one of the most frustrating problems we have. This is one of the reasons we're pushing toward Docker.

Is that really where we're at? That an "average Java developer" doesn't understand the classpath or environment?

I've certainly worked with a lot of folks who didn't, but I guess I've just always hoped that experience was unique to me.

Oh boy, if I could publish all of the things I went through. I was hoping too, until I have been in several companies, I have experienced with several developers and that was the time when I started to think, this is not an isolated problem but rather the average.

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