The Jakarta EE / MicroProfile and WebStandards Startup

An airhacks.fm conversation with Matthias Reining (@MatthiasReining) about:

Power Basic is not QBasic and was comparable with Turbo Pascal, game high score manipulation as programming motivation, C 64 was the first computer encounter, writing a "Jump and Run" game in Power Basic, Power Basic IDE as Christmas present, the menu bar fascination, using GW-Basic at high school, call by value vs. call by reference in Power Basic and Turbo Pascal, the Comal programming language, learning C, the University of Wuerzburg, learning Visual C++ and object oriented programming at university, C over C++, learning Java during internship at Nobiscum, writing a Java frontend with AWT for CVS as proof of concept, renaming com.sun.swing to javax.swing, switching to Lotus Notes as consultant, improving Lotus Notes user interface with Java, accessing Lotus Notes with JDBC, CouchDB the Lotus Notes "successor" created by Damien Katz - a former Lotus Notes developer, Lotus Notes the NoSQL database before the popularity of NoSQL, Transact-SQL, PL/SQL and back to Java, JSPs, Servlets, Tomcat and Apache Struts, from Java back to Pearl, the strategy of spending as much time as possible in a single project, writing fronted code with "this and that" or ES 5-the ancient JavaScript, the Java EE 5 fascination, xdoclet code generation for early EJB versions was slow, annotation-based programming with Java EE 5 improved the productivity, building a freelancer portal with Java EE 5 as proof of concept, a Java EE workshop in 2011, learning politics in Java insurance projects with "C-structs" as design pattern, enjoying PowerPoint time, founding a startup with Java EE 8 / Jakarta EE 8 and MicroProfile as technology choice, WildFly and Keycloak are the perfect technologies for a startup, focus on the business and not the technology, considering OpenLiberty and Quarkus as migration target caused by slow support of MicroProfile APIs by WildFly, saving memory with Quarkus, making WARs thinner by moving to MicroProfile JWT from proprietary Keycloak libraries, building the heart of an insurance company - an insurance platform, cloud-ready and private clouds are a common deployment model, migration from COBOL systems to tech11 insurance platform, team of 8 people is incredibly productive, it is hard to find good developers in Germany, hiring pragmatic developers from Afrika with the "ThinWAR" mindset, the "airhacks stack", polyglot programming is chaos, using Java EE 8 as the baseline, all other dependencies require permission, an average tech11 ThinWAR is a few hundreds kB, code snippets from 2005 gave Java EE a bad name, implement whatever you can today and care about potential problems tomorrow, the time to first commit has to be as low as possible, projects and products require different approaches, the "getting things done" developer, long-term maintenance is key to product success, every company has the right technology at certain time, Java EE is not the only "right" technology, projects are also barely dependent on Java EE, tech11 does not sell technology, tech11 sells solutions, using plain WebStandards with WebComponents, ES 6 in the frontend, Custom Elements looks like ReactJS, lit-html is one of the few dependencies in frontend, tech11 started with hyperHTML, then migrated to lit-html, open-wc comes with lots of examples with LitElement what is not necessary, using Parcel for packaging without any transpiling, rollup.js is great for packaging, Jenkins transpiles for older browsers, on developer machines not even npm is necessary, airhacks.io workshop about WebComponents: webcomponents.training, tech11 uses a BPM engine to manage processes, tarifs claims, policies are the names of microservices (ThinWARs), the episode #36 with Markus Kett mentions the JCon keynote,

Matthias Reining on twitter: @MatthiasReiningand his startup: https://tech11.com