Java EE 7 is Doing Fine in Production This Spring

Recently Juergen Hoeller from Spring put out a blog implying Java EE 7 is not fit for production and denigrating some fine open source servers in the process.

Now I cannot comment, nor have I got any unique insight into why the “big 3” of Oracle, IBM and RedHat haven’t released supported application servers with full Java EE 7 compatibility. However this doesn’t mean you can’t use Java EE 7 in production as this blog implies. In fact there are many Java EE7 applications in production now, for example just read Adam Bien’s blog where he lists many startups using Java EE 7 or checkout some of the presentations from Java One back last year like the UNHCR project.

Spring being a proponent of open source should know more than anybody that just because you haven’t paid for commercial support doesn’t mean software isn’t suitable for production. Juergen dismisses open source GlassFish as “just an RI…” which is frankly unfair to the fantastic engineers behind GlassFish. GlassFish is a superb application server for production deployments as many of our customers running production Java EE 7 on GlassFish know. He also dismisses open-source WildFly as an “R&D project…” which again is very unfair to the WildFly engineers. Much to my despair 😉 there are also many production WildFly instances running Java EE 7 applications perfectly happily (they really should migrate to Payara Server).

It is also not true that “There are no major EE 7 servers with production support”. We at Payara have been providing production support for GlassFish 4.x since July 2014 and provide full 24/7 production support with remote access and screen share assistance if anything should go wrong. In fact we fixed a bug to get Spring Boot working on GlassFish. There are also others including Hitachi and TmaxSoft which are Java EE 7 Compatible and supported. I’m also sure the “Big 3” will get their supported application servers GA in the very near future. There is absolutely no reason why you can’t run Java EE 7 in production now and many people do.

I am slightly bemused by the some of the rhetoric coming out of Spring at the moment with respect to Java EE 7 especially as Spring embraces many Java EE apis. I have huge respect for what the Spring project does and we support Spring applications on Payara Server and Payara Micro. However to paraphrase Shakespeare;

“The Spring Dude doth protest too much, methinks”