[jakarta.ee-community] A Composable Platform Over Profiles

[Jason Greene <jason.greene@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Over the years there has been vigorous debate about what makes the perfect profile. “Should spec X be included or not?” “Should we create a “plus” variant of the web profile?" “How many profiles is too many?" “How many is too few?" Recent threads you can see the topic rising again with Stable and Legacy profile proposals, and debate about whether or not JAX-WS should be part of the platform. 

A related issue is that EE compliance is overly strict. An implementor must ship exactly what a profile defines, with limited exceptions on variation. As an example, a certified web or full implementation can’t ship a newer version of the Servlet API, even though it’s fully backwards compatible. The default run mode / config of the implementation is also not allowed to enable a subset of the profile, even though the implementor’s primary audience may not need all of the specified technologies. 

The idea behind a rigid platform certainly had merit, and it arguably led to the very strong level of portability across containers we enjoy today. However, this one-size-fits-all approach just no longer fits the current state of software, with developers expecting a high degree of application specific tailoring.

I argue that a better approach would be to define the platform as a palette of composable standards[1], where profiles define only what must be available for a developer to choose from, and only limit the version of a given standard to the minimum that must be provided[2]. Under this model there is less of a need to define a perfect profile, since it can be freely adjusted by the developer to fit his or her needs. Instead, all that matters is that we have a sensible array of choice.

[1] It’s worth noting that this would require the TCK to be split up, as discussed previously, to facilitate the flexibility required in testing a near arbitrary combination of standards.

[2] For clarity, the full and web profiles would still be versioned (8.0 etc) as today, this is just a rule softening to support variation.

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Jason T. Greene
Chief Architect, JBoss EAP
Red Hat