Java Web Development (JSP/Servlets) Services

Web applications depend on Java-based services more than ever. Every request that comes from a browser, a mobile app, or an API client eventually reaches a backend service that must respond quickly and consistently. When traffic increases or a dependency slows down, many Java services fail in ways that are subtle at first and catastrophic later. A delay becomes a backlog. A backlog becomes a timeout. A timeout becomes a full service outage.

The goal of a reliable web service is not to avoid every failure. The real goal is to recover from failure fast enough that users never notice. What matters is graceful recovery.

Design documents in Enterprise Java often end up trapped in binary silos like Excel or Word, causing them to drift away from the actual code. This pattern shows how to treat Design Docs as source code by using structured Markdown and generative AI.

We've all been there: the architecture team delivers a Detailed Design Document (DDD) to the development team. It’s a 50-page Word file, even worse, a massive Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs defining Java classes, fields, and validation rules.

In this article, we will walk you through how to conduct a load test and analyze the results using Java Maven technology. We'll covering everything from launching the test to generating informative graphs and tables.

For this demonstration, we'll utilize various files, including Project Object Model (POM) files, JMeters scripts, and CSV data, from the jpetstore_loadtesting_dzone project available on GitHub. This will help illustrate the steps involved and the functionality of the necessary plugins and tools. You can find the project here: https://github.com/vdaburon/jpetstore_loadtesting_dzone.

When engineering teams modernize Java applications, the shift from JDK 8 to newer Long-Term Support (LTS) versions, such as JDK 11, 17, and soon 21, might seem straightforward at first. Since Java maintains backward compatibility, it's easy to assume that the runtime behavior will remain largely unchanged. However, that's far from reality.

In 2025, our team completed a major modernization initiative to migrate all of our Java microservices from JDK 8 to JDK 17. The development and QA phases went smoothly, with no major issues arising. But within hours of deploying to production, we faced a complete system breakdown.

Within the discipline of software engineering, practitioners are frequently encumbered by the monotonous ritual of initializing identical project scaffolds — configuring dependencies, establishing directory hierarchies, and reproducing boilerplate code prior to engaging in substantive problem‑solving. Although indispensable, such preliminary tasks are inherently repetitive, susceptible to human error, and inimical to efficiency. 

Maven, a cornerstone of the Java build ecosystem, furnishes an elegant mechanism to mitigate this redundancy through the construct of archetypes. An archetype functions as a canonical blueprint, enabling the instantaneous generation of standardized project structures aligned with organizational conventions. By engineering bespoke archetypes, development teams can institutionalize consistency, accelerate delivery, and reallocate intellectual effort toward innovation rather than procedural repetition.