My top wish for Java 8: EE applications as first class citizens

I have been a Java developer since the 1.02 days. It has been a long and fun ride, and in spite of what people said over the years the Java language and Java platform didn't die and are in fact stronger than ever. But sometimes I wish it would evolve faster. Java EE has come a long way, to the point  Java EE 6 can be considered a lightweight development platform. When Glassfish v3 was released one of the selling points was fast application (re)deployment times. This is an essential feature for any team in the quest for greater developer productivity: if you have to wait 120 seconds for a redeploy and you do it 30 times a day, you spend an entire working hour just waiting for the  server to reload your application. The problem is, even tough Glassfish v3 deploys applications very fast indeed (most of my deployments are under 12 seconds now, for relatively complex web applications) it also suffers from a problem that plagues every single Java EE implementation I have worked with: memory leaks. After very few redeployments the Glassfish JVM dies with java.lang.OutOfMemoryException and you need to forcefully kill it and start another instance. That ends up neutralizing most of the gains obtained with fast deployments. To be fair, it is not entirely Glassfish fault. I have been spending more time than I would like to admit chasing memory leaks and most of the times the cause lies in some third-pary library used by th...

Date: August, 23 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/jjviana/archive/2010/08/16/my-top-wish-java-8-ee-applications-first-class-citizens

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