Best Java frameworks for microservices. My experience.
Have you ever heard of microservices? Of course, you do! It sounds too good to leave it aside. In this post, I'll try to explain the aspects that should be considered before choosing the right framework and then check out the top frameworks for microservice-based Java software development, their advantages, disadvantages, and use cases. A quick reminder about microservices:
Microservice architecture (MSA) is an approach to designing software solutions that presuppose the creation of an application fragmented into small, loosely coupled modular components and services instead of building one big monolithic product.
How to choose a framework and win scalability and resilience for your project
My personal preference is Java, and that's why. Java frameworks for building MSA, let's take a look at key criteria that should be considered before choosing such technology for your project so that you would know how to shortlist them yourself properly.
Ease of development
The very essence of frameworks is to enhance developer productivity and optimize the project outcome. It's important to choose those frameworks that are easy to use, rich in terms of available tools, have well-written technical documentation, and can enable faster development.
Maturity of the community
There are numerous developers who work with microservices. Before choosing the framework, check the community of the microservices framework, paying attention to its history, popularity, size, reputation, and consistency in terms of updates.
Integration with cloud systems
It's a must to check the availability of integration/deployment with the cloud system which you are going to use.
Automation support
Check the framework for support for automation. It means that in order to save time, microservice deployment and implementation should be automated.
Now let's talk about frameworks. From my experience, there are the top 3 Java frameworks that have the most usage: Spring Boot, Micronaut, and Axon. I'll describe each side of the frameworks, their advantages, and their disadvantages.
Spring Boot
Advantages: a large community of helpful users, cost-effective open source framework, well-secured features, accelerated development cycle, a large number of developers, which makes it easy to assemble the team of skilled specialists, ability to configure the product in a flexible way thanks to a robust, easily configured, and stable IOC.
Disadvantages: large deployment files, needs to rely on the Spring ecosystem instead of using other tools that many developers find advantageous. Compared to Micronaut, it has worse support of serverless functions, such as AWS Lamda, and requires a longer microservice setup.
Micronaut
Advantages: boosted developer productivity, rapid and easy testing, low memory consumption, a smooth learning curve for software engineers, enables accelerated start-up time, reduced memory footprint.
Disadvantages: since Micronaut is quite new and less mature than other Java frameworks, there are fewer available skilled specialists. Also, the narrow focus of the framework won't allow you to change the service architecture if necessary. Hence, during product growth, it's possible to face certain limitations, and all the benefits can be offset by overcoding.
Axon
Advantages: ensures fast scaling, has vast dev community worldwide, can meet the most demanding business requirements. The framework enables extremely rapid completion of the request and response to the user actions.
Disadvantages: microservices built with Axon are hard to be covered with tests, it's complicated to test bugs, and they require large memory capacity. It also requires hiring developers who can apply DDD (domain-driven design) patterns and understand their main concepts. Also, such microservices require more initial investments since more resources are required in the cloud to deploy the system.
I hope you like this post. It is also important to know cases when it's better to use each of these frameworks. So you need a little research on this topic. This article also might help to learn more on this topic.
