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I bet big on Java/Jakarta EE, and the open source application server WildFly, years ago when the web version of Calcapp was born in 2014. I have been very happy with that decision. JAX-RS is a great way to build annotation-driven REST web services with very little boilerplate. WildFly (the open source version of JBoss EAP, essentially) is actively developed by Red Hat, starts quickly and is easy to work with. And the modern incarnation of Java -- with streams and lambdas -- is a great fit for what we do (building a compiler).

The only decision I have come to regret is using JPA, which is short for Java Persistence API (a specification for an ORM -- an Object-Relational Mapping), and where the most famous implementation is Hibernate. As far as ORMs go, Hibernate is probably fine, but I wish I had considered using something more light-weight and closer to the underlying database. As things stand, JPA mostly gets in the way, and I have had to resort to "native queries" (SQL) for our most performance-sensitive code paths.

I don't regret choosing JPA, as much as I regret choosing an ORM.

Also, as others have alluded to, Java is a stable choice. At the same time I chose Java EE and PostgreSQL, I chose AngularJS for our front end, which has been fully superseded by modern versions of Angular. We'll need to spend lots of time replacing AngularJS with React or Angular (we haven't decided yet), so that decision didn't really pan out.

On the server, though, I couldn't be happier with Java/Jakarta EE and PostgreSQL.



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