Several times I check architectural concepts. Let's start with the first stage.
The J2EE Architecture 2000-2010
It was mainstream in the first decade of 2000's years. If you stick to this technology, you have great chance to use an iPhone4 / Nokia 5230 as your daily device as state of the art technology that matches the one that you prefer at your company!
What car do you drive?
If you prefer the ancient technology in your company - how would you handle if the company gives such equipments for your work!
Now you understand the analogy, then envision the problem from a company side. You are a decision maker, and you before a system change at your company. You willing to either upgrade your system, or implement a new system. How its architecture reflected according to its age?
Let's see a timeline for the evolution!
Mainframe age (1970)
Central systems like IBM System/360, batch processing, high cost. Slow penetration, as only large enterprises afford these systems.
Cars: Muscle cars like Ford Mustang.
Personal computer: None
Mobile phone: None
Client-Server age (1985)
Decentralization, SQL databases, LAN networks, two layer architectures.
Cars: typically Toyota corolla 4th generation,
Personal computer: IBM PC AT 80286 512KB memory.
Mobile phone: Motorola DynaTAC 8000X
Web and J2EE age (2000)
Three layer models - Presentation / Business layer / data. Monolithic apps.
Cars: Honda Civic 7th generation
Personal computer: Dell Dimension Pentium III, 256MB RAM
Mobile phone: Nokia 3310
SOA age (2010)
Modular services SOAP/REST web services lazy coupling of the systems.
Cars: Toyota Camry 6. generation
Personal computer: HP Pavilion laptop Core i5 4GB RAM
Mobile phone: iPhone 4
Microservices and containerization (2015)
Indpendent services, containerization such Docker (2013) or Kubernetes (2014).
Car: BMW 3 Series F30
Personal computer: DELL XPS notebook Core i7 8GB RAM
Mobile Phone: Samsung Galaxy S6
Serverless and AI driven age (2025)
Event driven, AI optimized architecture with minimal footprint atomic codes.
Car: Tesla Model 3 self driving EV
Personal computer: MS Surface Ryzen CPU, 16GB RAM
Mobile Phone: iPhone 17/Google Pixel 10
This playful journey had the purpose to visualize how old is the architecture which many people sell you as state of the art.
It is even worst in reality, most company not even know how to distinct between the different definitions, and sells their microservice architecture where each microservice has a J2EE engine with an Oracle database!
If now the legacy implemented, how you answer problems you face in five years such as the Q-day, where the newly implemented system even outdated today?
We will not find the answer today, but hope this article opened your eyes!