Lightbend Welcomes Oracle's Embrace of Reactive for the Upcoming Java EE Releases

Recent JCP Meeting Recommends Java EE to Support Modern Distributed Applications for Flexibility, Reliability -- the Tenets of the Reactive Movement


SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 18, 2016) -  Lightbend (formerly Typesafe), the company behind the Reactive Platform that includes the Akka, Play and Lagom Frameworks as well as the Scala programming language, today announced its support of Oracle's strategic move to evolve Java EE support for Reactive.

In the August Executive Committee Meeting of the Java Community Process, Anil Gaur, Oracle Group Vice President delivered a presentation on Oracle's Java EE strategy. According to the Meeting Minutes, Gaur "noted that enterprise programming styles are changing -- more and more applications are distributed in nature and get deployed in cloud environments. Rather than traditional appservers that typically run multiple applications, apps are now distributed and deployed in the Cloud via modular runtimes dedicated to a single application or service."

Gaur went on to say that Oracle "would like the future of Java EE to be viable to the next generation of applications. These apps are composed and deployed differently in cloud and require flexibility, reliability and scale. The platform needs a new programming model that's geared towards reactive style programming for building large-scale distributed applications that are loosely coupled."

Lightbend CTO and Co-Founder Jonas Bonér is the original author of the Reactive Manifesto -- the canonical document that outlines the principles of the Reactive movement. The manifesto has been translated into 11 foreign languages and secured more than 15,000 signatures from developers who share the view that Reactive embodies the required characteristics of the modern application, built for the reality of massive numbers of concurrent users, cloud deployment, multi-core servers, and the rigors of today's data volumes. Among those supporting Oracle's embrace of Reactive are Java proponents like Pivotal who shared its own views on the importance of the Reactive movement in a detailed blog post earlier this year.

"Historically, enterprise Java developers have been deploying their monolithic applications into centralized application servers and servlet containers," said Mark Brewer, CEO at Lightbend. "But enterprises cannot afford for today's modern, microservices-based applications to be limited in their deployment by heavyweight, legacy architectures. This recent embrace by Oracle of Reactive signifies a tipping point for what had been stagnation for Java EE in fully supporting this modern class of application."

Lightbend's Reactive Platform is an application development solution powered by an open source core and commercial Production Suite for building scalable Reactive systems on the JVM. Lightbend led the Reactive Streams specification for asynchronous stream processing on the JVM with non-blocking back pressure -- an initiative with major industry support that is being incorporated into JDK 9. Lightbend is also the creator of Lagom, the open source Microservices framework (that recently reached its 1.0 milestone) designed to simplify and accelerate application infrastructure modernization for enterprises invested in Java.

In September at the JavaOne event in San Francisco, technology leaders from Lightbend will speak about Reactive trends in Java during five conference sessions:

  • Monitoring Reactive Microservices [CON1091]
  • End-to-End Reactive Streams, from Socket to Business [CON1852]
  • Stay Productive While Slicing Up the Monolith [CON6472]
  • One Microservice Is No Microservice: They Come in Systems [CON6471]
  • The Cloud-Natives Are RESTless [CON2514]

About Lightbend
Lightbend (Twitter: @Lightbend) provides the leading Reactive application development platform for building distributed applications and modernizing aging infrastructures. Using microservices and fast data on a message-driven runtime, enterprise applications scale effortlessly on cloud computing architectures. Many of the most admired brands around the globe are transforming their businesses with our platform, engaging billions of users every day through software that is changing the world.