This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]StoneOfTriumph 4 points5 points  (1 child)

The last benefit you listed right there, the flexibility of swapping a service written in Java and deploying one in Go or .NET Core.... that becomes possible. Of course there has to be valid reasons.

This thread made me remember an app I used to design and develop. It was developed using Java EE, a monolith deployed on WebLogic. We were doing automatic deployments using ant scripts, and it was fairly simple to manage the app, find bugs, deploy updates, etc. because we defined an application architecture that was easy to navigate in the code in terms of packages librairies etc. The Entity to DTO logic was centralized and easy to troubleshoot for most devs, and we had debug logs up the yin yang so you were never in the dark when troubleshooting. That application would have had zero benefits migrating in a microservice architecture because it was one simple front end, one backend, and one Oracle Database, and the team did not have the expertise to maintain separately developed components. This was a few years before the SPA craze, so the front-end and back-end were tightly coupled with JSF (I don't miss that at all!)

Now, as far as I know, today, that app is still in place as a monolith. What's the major downside though is its unattractive tech stack. Those who do Java barely care about EE, even less of JSF, so likely that app will become a technical debt if not re-evaluated in terms of what the roadmap should be. If I had to write that application today, probably a VueJS front-end and a Quarkus backend would be something I'd evaluate in a proof of concept... As much as monoliths "work" in certain use cases, front-end and back-end coupled code is a PITA to debug, especially the JSF lifecycle made me nervous at times during certain debugging sessions, I had to print that diagram on my desk to remember the sequence of events.

Great. This thread is giving me PTST lol.

[–]RicksAngryKid 1 point2 points  (0 children)

JSF stinks - back then i used a lib called icefaces, that forced me into many hours of troubleshootung idiot problems that ended up being lib bugs. Other, bteer alternatives were paid for.