Speaking from my personal pov, not my corporation, and just trying to be honest... I love the project, it's my favorite thing to reach for when I need to do anything. I stick with the 8.0.x version because it's quite stable and I rarely run into bugs that affect me. I don't really see a need to have the latest and greatest JakartaEE apis either, as JEE8 reached quite the maturity level. I have only committed a handful of times a year as bugs pop up that affect me in the TomEE project or an upstream one, but I could reach out to things that are affecting other users. I'm also a little lost on how to help with the latest JakartaEE impl efforts; I'm not sure what needs to be done or where I would fit in.
I think there are barriers of entry with Tomcat, ergo TomEE. Back in the day, everything was "application server first", meaning everyone used to install Tomcat/WebSphere/WebLogic etc, then begin coding. Nowadays SpringBoot and Quarkus have made things "executable first", in which things are packed into a single jar and executed. Granted the one-jar TomEE plugin can do that, and that's actually my favorite way to use TomEE, but it's not the default behavior which I think adds a barrier to entry. To get on-par with SpringBoot/Quarkus, I think you'd need a way for a person to download "one thing" and quickly build an executable jar. If the "war" step could be skipped that would be even better. The other barrier of entry is something I'm not comfortable helping on, as I have 0 UI skills, but the website and documentation could use a refresh to be more attractive. I hate criticizing this because I love the project and I know it rides on the love and sweat of many volunteers and friends, so please don't take this harshly. I will say TomEE absolutely spanks WildFly, SpringBoot, and OpenLiberty as far as real-world startup times of complicated apps on a 1:1 comparison between running the _exact_ same app. It's really only bested by Quarkus, but Quarkus doesn't do the half of what TomEE plus can, so it's not really a fair matchup. Its memory footprint is also quite small; I have some apps that run in 32m JVMs :) These are advantages almost nobody is aware of, and this project has a lot to offer people. I know it takes a village, but I'm willing to be a hand in the "many hands". On Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 2:37 PM David Blevins <david.blev...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi All, > > Wanted to share the state of this project as reported to the Apache board. > > - https://tomee.apache.org/board-report-2023-09-20.txt > > The short version is we do not get enough help from you to keep this project > going. > > Should we continue or should we just give up? > > > > -David > -- Jonathan | exabr...@gmail.com Pessimists, see a jar as half empty. Optimists, in contrast, see it as half full. Engineers, of course, understand the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
