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Building a Mission-Critical Open Source Java Platform – The Web Layer

Currently the Java platform is one of the most consolidated in the world, much of this is due to platform's ability to support other languages such as Kotlin, Groovy and Scala, etc. Thousands of web and mobile applications are developed using the platform as a base. The Java platform has changed a lot in recent years and probably will keep evolving.

In parallel with these changes, we see the evolution application servers, that increasingly offer highly complex features such as load balancing components, smart asynchronous messaging, transaction control and many other technologies facilitating application development and standardization. They also provide a stable and scalable infrastructure for mission critical applications. One of the biggest challenges for application servers is to couple highly complex services, making them stable and flexible.

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How to Install Payara 5 With NGINX and Let’s Encrypt Over Oracle Linux 7.x

From field experience, I must affirm that one of the greatest and stable combinations I've seen is Java Application Servers + Reverse Proxies. Although some of the functionality is a clear overlap, I tend to put reverse proxies in front of application servers for the following reasons (please see this NGINX page for more details):

  • Load balancing: The reverse proxy acts as a traffic cop and could be used as an API gateway for clustered instances/backing services
  • Web acceleration: Most of our modern applications use SPA frameworks, hence it is worth caching all the JS/CSS/HTML files and freeing the application server from that responsibility
  • Security: Most HTTP requests could be intercepted by the reverse proxy before any attempt against the application server, increasing the opportunity to define rules
  • SSL Management: It is easier to install/manage/deploy OpenSSL certificates in Apache/NGINX compared to Java KeyStores. Besides this, Let's Encrypt officially supports NGINX with plugins.

Requirements

To demonstrate this functionality, this tutorial combines the following stack in a classic (non-Docker) way, though most of the concepts could be useful for Docker deployments: