Productivity tools in growing lightweight architectures

TheServerSide first met Simon Maple when he was employed at IBM's fabled Hursley Lab in the U.K. At the time, he was demonstrating a WebSphere Liberty profile installed on a Raspberry Pi, a surprising feat, as WebSphere products tend to have a reputation for being resource hogs that disappoint in terms of performance -- even when copious amounts of hardware are provisioned.

Since then, Maple has solidified his reputation in the industry as a respected thought leader, and he currently works as a developer advocate at ZeroTurnaround, a software development tools company based in Boston and Tartu, Estonia. TheServerSide caught up with him for a podcast interview while he was on the public relations circuit, spreading the word about the virtues of XRebel, ZeroTurnaround's lightweight Java profiler, which is soon to see a version 2.2 release.

Now that Maple is no longer in IBM's employ, the first thing we wanted to get from him was not a discussion of XRebel and its new sharing capabilities, but instead, his honest take on the role of the monolithic application server in a world where microservices and lightweight architectures are all the rage.

"A lot of people will prefer the traditional Java EE style environment, where you have one big platform," said Maple about the comfort many organizations find in having a middleware platform, such as WebSphere, as their deployment target of choice. "People will favor different flavors, whether that's microservices where you have much more lightweight, modular-style environments or one big platform."