What makes a technology lightweight? And how lightweight, productive and relevant is Java EE in the age of containers and cloud?

One of the most important aspects of a lightweight technology is the productivity and effectiveness it enables. The time the development team spends is precious and expensive and the less time spent on overhead the better. This includes developing glue code, building projects, writing and executing tests, and deploying software, on both local and remote environments. Ideally, engineers can spend as much time as possible on implementing revenue-generating business functionality.

A technology should therefore not add much overhead on top of the business use cases. Technical cross-cutting concerns are certainly necessary but should be kept to a minimum. In the previous chapter, we have seen how Java EE enables developers to implement business use cases in a productive way. Project artifact builds and deployments should in the same way aim to minimize the required time and effort.

This and the following chapter will show how Java EE supports crafting productive development workflows.