The Modern Java Platform - 2021 Edition
Many developers were burned by the overly complex world of Java back in the early 2000s. The Gang of Four patterns and middleware / J2EE / Java EE led to ridiculous levels of alleged decoupling as is evident in this sequence diagram from an open source J2EE ecommerce system I worked on in 2002:
Back in 2014 I wrote about how things had changed: Java Doesn’t Suck – You’re Just Using it Wrong. But six years have passed since I wrote that and things have continued to improve, making the Java platform a fantastic option when building microservices, data pipelines, web apps, mobile apps, and more. Let’s walk through some of the “modern” (as of 2021) aspects to the Java platform.