If one thing can be said about the IT industry is that things are in constant flux. Every year there are new tools, new technologies and new articles that claim Java is dead, or not relevant, or being imminently replaced, and yet Java is still as relevant to modern businesses as it was a decade ago. The temptation is to look at Java middleware from the mid-2000s and dismiss in light of the shift into cloud based development and deployment practices and say “it isn’t relevant”. However Java middleware of the late 2010s is very different, more efficient and more cloud ready than ever.

In modern cloud environments you need runtimes that start and stop quickly, use a low memory footprint, scale well for high throughput and provide just enough runtime to support your application needs. Traditional Java application servers don’t do this, but the traditional application server has been replaced by more efficient and effective frameworks that enable you to more quickly build and deploy your applications while using existing APIs that have been proven at building complex and reliable applications. Open Liberty is one such project, available under the Eclipse Public License it provides a fast, efficient and scalable foundation for building modern applications.

In this session Alasdair Nottingham, the Open Liberty lead, will guide you through the Open Liberty project and how to use it to build modern applications using Java EE, Eclipse MicroProfile or Spring that can be easily deployed into cloud platforms like Kubernetes.