Light rant about embedded solutions for Jakarta EE

update 2023-02-01 the microprofile specification might be what i want.

Unlike spring-boot, JakartaEE applications usually organizes application code apart from server code.

Java web projects used to be packaged into war or ear files and the server was managed separately.

I am trying to find a project layout for JakartaEE projects that comply with separation but behaves more like a springboot app and, in order to get it, i am exploring the embedded app servers approach.

So far, i am thinking on a multiproject layout, one with regular JEE style structure and another with an embedded app server consuming the first one. Gradle and maven both supports it:

• https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/multi_project_builds.html
• https://books.sonatype.com/mvnex-book/reference/multimodule-sect-simple-parent.html

For the embedded app server i found these samples so far:

• https://blog.payara.fish/what-is-payara-embedded?
• https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/was-liberty/zos?topic=liberty-embedding-server-in-your-applications
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71383171/simple-embedded-tomcat-10-example
• https://github.com/wildfly/wildfly-core/blob/main/embedded/src/test/java/org/wildfly/core/embedded/EmbeddedServerFactorySetupUnitTestCase.java
• https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/documentation/jetty-11/programming-guide/index.html#creating-helloworld-class

A good article on this topic follows:

• https://www.baeldung.com/executable-jar-with-maven

For the project layout i don't have much ideas yet, i am only sure about the separation of the two modules. A few questions so far:

• should the embedded final jar file be an uber jar?
• should the war/ear artifact be repackaged?
• why this approach isn't more popular, given the clear success of spring boot?

Any comment on this topic is welcome on this thread.