Pragmatica Aether: Let Java Be Java

The Aberration We build Java applications like Go or Rust programs. Fat JARs. Docker images. Kubernetes deployments. Everyone does it, so it looks normal. It contradicts Java's design DNA. Java has always been a language for managed environments. Applets ran inside browsers. Servlets ran inside application servers. EJBs ran inside containers like JBoss and WebLogic. OSGi bundles ran inside runtime containers like Eclipse Equinox. In every generation, the pattern was the same: a managed runtime hosts the application. The application handles business logic. The runtime handles infrastructure. The fat-jar era threw that away. We stopped letting Java be Java. We started bundling web servers, serialization frameworks, service discovery clients, configuration management, health checks, metrics libraries, and logging frameworks into every application. Then we wrapped the result in a Docker container and deployed it to an orchestration platform that reimplements — poorly — the infrastructure m