Modern Java EE Design Patterns

Chapter 1. Enterprise Development Today

Enterprise is a noun. One of its meanings refers to a project or undertaking, especially a bold or complex one. But it also refers more generally to businesses or corporations. Used in the context of software technology, the term encapsulates a mixture of these meanings, which is underlined by the inability to adopt new technologies at a reasonable speed due to a large organization’s inability to move quickly. Nevertheless, all those attributes and descriptions are very personal based on specific work environments. And not everything about this negative introduction is bad. The reasons behind this are obvious: those complex undertakings or large organizations need a much higher level of standardization than startups. Changing a small thing for one out of a hundred projects might lead to unanticipated problems.

One major technology that has become a standard platform across most enterprises to build complex—and stable—applications is Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE). And while this technology stack has come a long way since its inception in 1998, it is still not meant to be used for innovation and the adoption of more cutting-edge technologies and development paradigms.

Nevertheless, innovation and constant improvement are the drivers behind enterprises and enterprise-grade projects. Without innovation, there will be outdated and expensive infrastructure components (e.g., host systems) that are kept alive way longer than the software they are running was designed for. Without constant validation of the status quo, there will be implicit or explicit vendor lock-in. Aging middleware runs into extended support and only a few suppliers will still be able to provide know-how to develop for it. Platform stacks that stay behind the latest standards attempt to introduce quick and dirty solutions that ultimately produce technical debt.

And typically every 5 to 10 years, the whole software industry, especially in the enterprise integration or enterprise application space, spits out a new methodology or architectural style that promises to make everything 10 times more productive, agile, flexible, and responsive. As a result, we’ve seen everything from the creation of enterprise application integration, web services, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) to component-based architectures and enterprise service buses (ESBs).

Enterprise Goals and Objectives

As technology has evolved, the decision makers in enterprise IT departments have implemented new capabilities and processes across their organizations. Thus, IT has changed operations and turnaround for the better. But besides this technical standardization and forward march of progress in internal operations and cost cutting, these departments are still accused of not understanding the needs of the business. Operations and buying decisions are still focused on generating quick results from investments and long-term cost savings. These results ignore the need for new business requirements or market developments, such as the still growing mobile market or the new communication style of a whole generation.

Resistant to Change and Economically Efficient

Speaking of this mismatch, operations and business have always followed completely distinct goals while working on the greater good. Operations and sourcing have won out mostly. It’s an easier business case to calculate how much a corporation-wide standardization for a Java EE application server can produce in savings than to examine the individual lines of source code and maintenance that must be dealt with for each individual project. And it’s not only the difference in mindset behind this. It’s also about long-term support and license agreements. Instead of changing the foundation and everything attached to it a couple of times a year, decisions need to guarantee a decent support level over many years. Following this, the gap between what latest technology is state-of-the-art and what enterprises allow developers to work with grows larger each year.

Developers Left Alone

Even if the preceding analysis barely scratches the surface, it reveals why developers are feeling left alone in those enterprise settings. Having to fight the same stack day in and day out might have advantages for generating knowledge about common pitfalls and shortcomings, but it also puts a strong block on everything that promises to solve problems more elegantly, in shorter timeframes, and with a lot less code. And we haven’t even talked about the other problem that results from this.

Technology-Centric Versus Business-Centric

Many traditional enterprises have become strongly business-centric and mostly treat IT and operations as cost centers. The goal of providing homogenous IT services was mostly reached by overly focusing on IT architectures, information formats, and technology selection processes to produce a standard platform for application operations. This produced a dangerous comfort zone that siphons attention away from the real value of business software: the business domains and relevant processes whose standardization and optimization promise a much higher payback than just operational optimizations.

The good news is that many organizations have started to take notice and are undertaking changes toward easier and more efficient architecture management. But change is something that doesn’t necessarily have to come from above; it is also the responsibility of every developer and architect. As a result, today’s buzzwords have to be incorporated in a manageable way by all parties responsible for creating software.

Aims and Scope

So, there’s a lot to reflect on here. This report focuses on how enterprises work and how the situation can be improved by understanding how—and when—to adopt the latest technologies in such an environment. The main emphasis is on understanding Java EE design patterns, as well as how to work with new development paradigms, such as microservices, DevOps, and cloud-based operations.

This report also introduces different angles to the discussion surrounding the use of microservices with well-known technologies, and shows how to migrate existing monoliths into more fine-grained and service-oriented systems by respecting the enterprise environment. As you’ll come to find out, Java EE is only a very small—yet crucial—component of today’s enterprise platform stacks.