Transactions, J2EE, Java EE, Jakarta EE, MicroProfile and Quarkus

An airhacks.fm conversation with Mark Little (@nmcl) about:

the 250 miles terminal connection, Commodore PET, battle ships on paper tapes, mocking the login screen on Commodore, reverse engineering Space Invaders, the lack of games in UK was a motivation for writing games, learning peek and pokes, Commodore engineering team wrote a book about machine code, Basic on BBC model B, Pascal and C on EPROMs, building a hotel booking system on Pascal, building a pseudo operating system with C, Concurrent Pascal, Cfront - the early version of C++, Atari ST came with C support, C++ over Concurrent Euclid, working with Andy Tannenbaum and Bjorne Stroustroup on Minix, porting Minix to Atari ST, Arjuna the Indian god, Indian Gods over Celtics, Arjuna -- the object oriented transaction system, started in 1985, inheriting transactions, transactions are not about HA, transactions are about recoverability, starting Java as Oak, the shiny object syndrome and transition to Java, writing web browsers in Java, porting Arjuna to Java with Blackdown Java, Jim Waldo and Note on Distributed Computing, opaque over transparent, Johan Vos was a member of the Blackdown team, RPC with C++ and Arjuna, almost serverless, packing and unpacking instances and the Lock Manager, 2PC was the default, without X/Open XA heuristics the system would block forever, XA heuristics were introduced to make independent decisions, enforcing consistency in microservices with 2PC/XA is hard, SOA and microservices come with similar challenges, there is no a single transaction model applicable for every single use case, XA/2PC is lesser suited for long running actions, transactions were out-of-fashion - now they are back, Google Spanner is transactional, Arjuna was acquired by Bluestone, Arjuna Technologies was acquired by HP, JBoss did a partial acquisition of Arjuna, before the Arjuna acquisition, JBoss couldn't handle 2PC properly, Bluestone became the HP application server, JBoss was always opensource and good quality code, J2EE came before annotations - metadata was attached with partially redundant XML, Mark became RedHat CTO in 2009, MicroProfile is great and there is a lot of interests in evolving Java into clouds by the community, Jakarta EE was a great move by Oracle in 2017, Jakarta EE has to move faster, Jakarta EE is more like the stable OS, MicroProfile is where the innovation happens, there are no more monolithic application server, what does "enterprise" mean?, QuarkEE is opinionated Quarkus,

Mark Little on twitter: @nmcl, Mark's blog