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