I came across this post about
Java microservice architecture today. It espouses the benefits of modularising applications into individual services that can be deployed and function on their own, scaled up as necessary, without the overhead of having an app server and all the resources it needs to meet the needs of both CPU and memory intensive aspects of the application. It goes on to say that the days of having a fat or monolitihic application, where all of the logic needed to run it is contained in one place, eg bin the EAR, WAR.
A few times throughout the article, and in conclusion, one of the bullet points is:
Your services have main methods
This leads me to believe, in conjunction with the lack of an app server, that these services are written in
Java SE, rather than EE. However, one of the references,
Micro Services - Java the Unix Way states on slide 56, "Our Stack":
Embedded Jetty (current project uses SimpleWeb)
Now, does use of Jetty imply that actually Java SE with servletts is what is required to build an application based on a microservice architecture, hence the use of Jetty? Or can all of the requirements, including use of WebSockets (I thought SE only has a client implementation), be met purely by SE? Does anybody have any useful resources showing a basic implementation process in vanilla Java? I'd be interested to see some example source code.
What I have not found in the above article, or the few references I have had time to skim through, is any real argument other than lack of standards for SOA. What, therefore, are the pros and cons of adopting a microservices architecture? Are there any areas where it really is weak? Given Java EE is capable of managing a lot of the security functions necessary of a web-based (or any other) application, how is this achieved in a microservices architecture? These are all questions that seem to be lacking answers and I would be greatful of thoughts and pointers to follow on resources.
