Java EE Adoption: Migrating From Tomcat to Java EE and TomEE

One of the most important things to do at this stage of the life-cycle of Java EE is highlight successful adoption stories at a regular cadence. We have been doing just that for a long time through our adoption stories blog, this humble blog as well as JavaOne. Indeed, JavaOne 2016 was particularly good in this regard. We had a number of solid adoption stories submitted that we could select from. We will highlight all of those stories here in the coming months. A particularly nice adoption story presented at JavaOne 2016 was from Dassault Systemes.

Although the average developer and consumer are probably not aware of Dassault Systemes, it is a company that powers many of the world's most critical industrial processes. It is one of the global leaders in 3D modeling (think CAD/CAM), product life-cycle management systems. Just some companies that rely on Dassault Systemes include the likes of Boeing, Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, Honda, Samsung, Coca Cola, Nokia, Nikon, Panasonic, LG, Procter & Gamble, GE, Johnson & Johnson and Exxon. French-based Dassault Systemes is recognized to be one of the most innovative companies in the world. The company offers its products both on-premise and as SaaS on their own cloud.

The company chose to standardize their very diverse set of products geared towards various industry verticals on Java EE and TomEE. They cited reasons like ensuring consistency throughout a large number of systems, avoiding third-party jar/configuration/class-path hell, providing a fully supported uniform stack, portability, and modernizing technology in a managed, sustainable fashion. Their migration experience was quite varied and represents the gamut of what others can expect in adopting Java EE. They migrated a large number of Tomcat-based applications using various third-party libraries to Java EE. They also migrated over legacy C/C++ applications as well as legacy J2EE applications. They even ported from one Java EE application server to another to get to a common base with TomEE. TomEE was cited as a particularly easy way to migrating from Tomcat to Java EE. They are looking forward to TomEE moving ahead with Java EE 7 support. The session explains their entire migration story in a concise, clear fashion. You can view the session below (click here if you are having trouble seeing the embedded video).

If you have a similarly great Java EE adoption story to share with the community (particularly migration stories from other technologies), please do feel encouraged to reach out. In the spirit of Java EE centric vendor neutrality, what Java EE implementation or tool set you choose does not matter at all and neither does which part of the globe you are in.