[cess11]

If someone reads this and wonders what JBoss is, the contemporary variety is called WildFly and it is actually rather easy to install and play around with.

https://www.wildfly.org/

I think this is an often overlooked solution to some of the problems we nowadays tend to approach the clown for.

As for build systems, Maven is old and cranky but if something else replaces it, it will probably be quite similar anyway.

[mands]

Yep, I'm using JBoss as a catch-all for older "big-iron" style Application Servers - modern Jakarta EE (10 onwards) is much more slimmed down, and a solid option.

unsure re Maven, 4.0.0 has been around the corner for years, but I think there is space for a modern alternative that is JPMS first, supports semantic versioning (i.e. tilde/carat notation) with lockfiles, and doesn't require a bunch of plugins out of the box for common use-cases. Maybe Mill (https://mill-build.org) - i've yet to try it.

[cess11]

Mill looks kind of nice on the surface but I haven't seen it in action in any serious project. I suspect the flexible DSL might come with a maintenance burden.

XML is nice, if your pom.xml is massive, just suck it in through JAXB and program against it, perhaps render it to a web page. XSLT can also be helpful. We're not supposed to look at XML as plain text.

[zokier]

> As for build systems, Maven is old and cranky but if something else replaces it, it will probably be quite similar anyway.

Bazel is the most obvious contender and very different from Maven in almost every possible way.

[cess11]

Not really, no. It is similar but worse than Maven in that it requires quite a bit of time investment to configure, and shares the drawback of Gradle that it is configured in a programming language instead of a configuration language.

Switching out Maven for a larger maintenance burden might be reasonable in a large organisation that is swimming in competent employees, but most do not.

As for obvious contender, I'd say that would be Gradle, which is harder to get someone started with than Maven and due to the DSL allows you to invent weirder footguns.

[rubzah]

Did everyone just agree to forget about Gradle? It was everywhere not too long ago. I think I even prefer it to Maven, in a choice between a rock and a hard place type of way.

[cess11]

I don't think so, but the pain points have become more widely known and taken the edge off the hype.

[cmwelsh]

As you’re familiar with the JBoss space, why would someone use an enterprise container over a simple HTTP server (Tomcat, Jetty, etc)?

Currently I’m trying to externalize as much as possible to the service mesh. I want teams to stand up a basic unencrypted HTTP server that accepts the company headers and just works with as minimal of a runtime as possible.

[gf000]

I wouldn't use application servers today, but they were solving many of the same issues as whole kubernetes clusters do, decades ago.

The Java (now Jakarta) EE standard on top is a good base for third party implementations to "speak a common language", e.g. it's not that hard to move between Quarkus/spring/micronaut etc, even if not all support the actual standard.

[brightball]

JBoss was great back in the day. I remember when there was a JRuby port of it called Torquebox that I loved.

Eventually though, I found Elixir and it gave me everything I was looking for from that stack.

[cess11]

Yeah, same, but Elixir gigs aren't as common as Java gigs. However, if one ends up in a Java role, chances are that Elixir would be a good porting target for the systems since it typically can replicate the architecture but with less fuss and has pretty good support for interfacing with Java.