Sun Jun 5, 2016
Modern Java EE servers are much different than any other software development stack I have known. Meanwhile others platforms get bloated with time, I have observed the inverse on Java EE, at least the opensource ones. I have been working migrating to WildFly 10, the upstream project for JBoss AS, this thing start in just 3 seconds. I remember when I was amazed when JBoss 6 EAP started in multiples of that time a few years back, and no, it isn’t because of new hardware, my laptop is more than five years old.
WildFly is very smart, it only start services when they are needed, so if it will run a simple application, with no fancy EJB, container transaction managment and/or message queues, etc., it guarantee that those services aren’t started. You can even remove modules you don’t need. There is a WildFly distribution for basic Servlet API based applications with all other services/APIs removed.
Java EE isn’t and old thing that doesn’t evolve. Talking about it like what you know is from 2001 is like talking about JavaScript from Netscape 2.0.