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. Ehsan Zaery Moghaddam from Gam Electronics recently reached out to us with a very nice detailed, well-written Java EE 7 adoption story. Another cool thing about Ehsan's adoption story is that it uses WebLogic in addition to WildFly. Yet another very interesting aspect of the story is that it is about everyday business technology in Iran. Many developers should be able to relate to the story - especially ones still making the transition from J2EE to Java EE. I asked him a series of questions on his Java EE 7 adoption over email.
Gam Electronics is one of the most well-known office automation solution providers in Iran with about 600 clients, ranging from large banks and insurance companies to mobile carriers and municipalities. There are more than 300,000 users throughout the country working with their products on a daily basis. They started their systems with J2EE and in recent years have migrated first to Java EE 6 and now to Java EE 7. In detailing his extensive experience with Java EE Ehsan noted it's strong points in standardization, vendor neutrality, comprehensive feature set, productivity, simplicity, minimizing boilerplate, interoperability and runtime performance. He mentioned how moving to Java EE helped him avoid both custom homemade code and third-party libraries. He provided very specific examples of how CDI, EJB 3, JPA 2.1, Bean Validation 1.1 and JAX-RS helped his projects. He is now exploring deriving the primary practical benefits of microservices by breaking up his applications into smaller war deployments. He is actively tracking Java EE 8 progress such as work on the Java EE Security API. You should definitely read his detailed interview posted on my personal blog. There are simply too many valuable points mentioned to summarize briefly!
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.