Trying Liberty 8.5.5
Historically Java EE servers were known for being monolithic and heavyweight. Over the years this has improved tremendously with many free, open source and lightweight solutions available, such as GlassFish, TomEE, Resin and JBoss. Even the grandfather of the modern Application Server, Bea's WebLogic (now Oracle's) has severely slimmed down . One "heavyweight beast" remained though; IBM's WebSphere. It's perhaps an understatement to say WebSphere is not universally liked by developers . A 2GB download size that happens via a proprietary installer (which is 100MB), which doesn't cleanly work on all possible Linux flavors and doesn't work at all on OS X, which needs another 200MB orso just to create a "profile" after the 2GB download which came after the 100MB installer, takes ages to start and can't be started in any of the popular IDEs (like Eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ) are all things that don't really fly with the average dev