Towards a cloud-enabled Java EE platform

The recent development in cloud computing also resulted in a demand for designing and executing Java EE applications in the cloud environment. The existing design of Java EE does not allow the developers and infrastructure providers to take full advantage of cloud computing for running such applications — containers do not scale automatically, multitenancy is not supported and finally, there are no monitoring capabilities. In this paper we review the characteristics of Java EE execution in the cloud environment and propose a parameter system to support and effect the deployment and application execution. Based on the proposed parameter system we derive metadata which can be used by developers to take the advantage of cloud specific behaviour. We show how metadata was implemented and how the application scalability capabilities were improved.