The future of building Java EE application architecture is becoming clearer

Well-known JavaEE freelance architect recently published his vision for the future in building enterprise application architecture. Next is the free translation.

Java EE 6 and Spring 3 turned out to be very similar - at least the architecture and design differ only in details . I do not see any differences during the development process, where JPA and SessionBeans in Glassfish can be replaced with Spring technologies.

Spring also comes with its application server, which has been an open source server with commercial support since October 7, 2008. If you need to get patches for older versions of Spring, you will need to purchase commercial support from SpringSource / VMWare. For serious projects, you will be forced to purchase two support packages - for the application server from the vendor and one from SpringSource, although in this case the simultaneous use of Java EE 5/6 is difficult to prove. In the future, I see two possible options:

• Deploy Spring to a proprietary tc server
• Deploying Java EE 6 applications without Spring

The above dilemma is also valid for migration projects - is it worth using the Java EE stack or migrating to Spring. This is a strategic or political dilemma rather than a technological one. Of course, you can still compile and distribute Spring yourself, but this approach is unacceptable in most commercial projects.

I believe that the future of enterprise Java is very clean - we fully use either Spring or the Java EE stack, but not these technologies together.

See also Oracle posted Glassfish development plans