All very good points. It is amazing how easy people will curse Java without understanding why it is still used so widely.
In fairness, a docker-like chroot jail helps you encapsulate the whole JVM and app server into an immutable unit, which is arguably more manageable than relying on Chef or Puppet or Ansible to keep its configuration stable and versions up to date.
> In fairness, a docker-like chroot jail helps you encapsulate the whole JVM and app server into an immutable unit, which is arguably more manageable than relying on Chef or Puppet or Ansible to keep its configuration stable and versions up to date.
In Java land, you can accomplish that by:
1) Embedding the application server in your own binary; eg, Tomcat and Jetty et al have simple APIs that you can use to run the app server, or
2) Simply packaging them up in a single directory next to each other, or
3) Treating the app server as a deployment fabric (ala Amazon Elastic Beanstalk) and versioning the app server and the wars separately, which has some mighty fine maintenance and deployment advantages.
The only thing you have to do is wire your server into the platform's init scripts, and everything else is self-contained.
1 and 2 are fine points, point 3 to me is what I was getting at, just with a more portable system rather than something cloud-provider specific
Containers are exciting precisely because they don't care about how good or crappy your language interpreter or app server happens to be, whether you run your own data center or use a cloud, etc.
In fairness, a docker-like chroot jail helps you encapsulate the whole JVM and app server into an immutable unit, which is arguably more manageable than relying on Chef or Puppet or Ansible to keep its configuration stable and versions up to date.