Re: [jakarta.ee-community] Why not dropping EARs in Jakarta EE?

[Ralph Soika <ralph.soika@xxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with you and I want to point out, that EAR in general is a good concept. But the problem from my personal view is, that the classloading mechanisms are not standardized between the different platforms (e.g. wildfly/glassfish). This often results in problems when trying to move an application, which is running fine on the one platform, to another.

In my specific case I had a jar file with EJBs which contains no descriptors. The platform-neutral integration of such a library into an ear is a problem. But it is no problem when deploying this library in a WAR. My opinion for that is, that in a WAR we have the /WEB-INF/ folder for all the descriptor files. In an EAR we have not such a central directory. And this causes the confusion/problems. In my case, the problems occurred with an EJB that fired CDI events....

===
Ralph 

Am 30.04.2018 um 15:19 schrieb Peter Richardson:

I agree completely with Mrinal. 

While microservices are hot today we need to keep in mind Java EE is used for a lot more than that and there are many, large, and expensive to refactor, legacy EE projects that are still smarting from the decision to drop EJB. If these projects are to keep pace with Jakarta EE's more rapid release pace and the resulting testing and acredidation requirements levied by customers then backwards compatibility will be key. 

I would rather this group work towards making EAR a real cross-platform specification so that an EAR could be deployed on Wildfly, GlassFish, TomcatEE etc. without reconfiguration. Right now I agree that this is an issue as well we recently moved our EAR deployment from GlassFish to JBossEAP with some headaches. 

-Peter Richardson-

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018, 8:53 AM Mrinal Kanti <mrinal.kanti@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Why are we still discussing this?

Java EE had profiles (web and full) support since v6. It is for good reasons that the web profile has been implemented as a subset of the full profile and not as a stand-alone profile, Applications that work with web profile should not break when working with full profile thereby assuring upgrade-ability and portability. If CDI or any other platform technologies has any problems inter-operating with the full profile then it is the responsibility of the respective platform technology stakeholders to address that in their own specs/implementations unless there are valid issues/limitations with any of the full profile specs/implementations. In addition to the EAR support mandated by the JEE full specs, several app servers have provided their own proprietary classloader mechanisms to make packaging and deployment more flexible albeit, at the cost of vendor lock-in/portability.

Modifying EAR support will have severe impact on several existing enterprise packaging and deployment scenarios especially involving shared libraries and entities (such as JAXB, JPA). Also the concept of having a inter-application-wide parent classloader facilitates several implementation approaches such as scoped objects and simplified transaction boundary realization - stuff that are not easy to implement over microservices (and are often ignorantly dismissed as anti-patterns).

JPMS support is fairly new and its spec has been validated largely against the JDK libraries. Even then, I see it as augmenting the EAR classloader specs rather than replacing it.

Marking EAR support as optional/deprecated will only cause more problems as more and more specs(and TCKs) would start ignoring it.

Personally, I do not see any strong argument against the EAR support so long as enterprises are still using monolithic deployments. Though micro-services are increasingly becoming popular, the monolithic deployment approaches are still relevant in several use cases.

Besides, the issue raised by the OP has already been addressed in the original GH issue.

-Mrinal

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 4:27 PM, Dmitry Kornilov <dmitry.kornilov@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think that Jakarta EE should have profiles. Full profile should be as much backwards compatible as possible with previous version (read Java EE). It should support EARs. Other profiles (Web, Micro?) may not support EARs, or it should be up to implementations to support it.

— Dmitry

On 30 Apr 2018, at 11:55, Alexander Salvanos <salvanos@xxxxxx> wrote:

Hi all,

while I agree, that dropping EAR's feels like a good idea, for large scaled Java EE projects in huge companies, this could result into costs we could avoid, by keeping backward compatibilty.

Just like RMI-IIOP we should begin at the most with the term PROPOSED OPTIONAL and later OPTIONAL for a long period, before it can be dropped.

Best,

Alex

 

 

Gesendet: Montag, 30. April 2018 um 11:27 Uhr
Von: "Adam Bien" <abien@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
An: "Jakarta EE community discussions" <jakarta.ee-community@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Betreff: Re: [jakarta.ee-community] Why not dropping EARs in Jakarta EE?

HI Ralph,

EARs are helpful to deploy multiple WARs at once. E.g. a main microservice with a corresponding sidecar.

However: I didn't created any EARs since Java EE 6,

cheers,

adam

> On 28. Apr 2018, at 10:06, Ralph Soika <ralph.soika@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> to my background: I have been developing enterprise applications for more than 10 years, mostly as EARs. So I am mainly a User of EE and was never part of a EE working group. My opinion about EARs after years is: It's an awful disaster if you're trying to develop an ear platform independently. So why should it be called 'standard'?
>
> Today I wonder what can be achieved with an EAR, which could not be achieved easier and clearer with a clean microservice architecture?
>
> So I'm suggesting removing EAR support from Jakarta EE. This makes the platform easier to learn and more lightweight.
>
> If you like, you can read the following discussion. It's about the question of how to package shared EJB libraries in one ear. And it shows how awkward it is to talk about EAR deployment questions.
> https://github.com/payara/Payara/issues/2508#issuecomment-385129757
>
> What is your opinion about the future support of the concept of EAR?
>
> ===
> Ralph
>
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