Over the past few years, the Java community has been offered a wide variety of microservices-based frameworks to build enterprise, cloud-native and serverless applications.

The concept of microservices emerged from the service-oriented architecture (SOA) that was introduced nearly 20 years ago. SOA applications used technologies such as the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to build enterprise applications. Today, however, the Representational State Transfer (REST) protocol is the primary method for microservices to communicate with each other via HTTP.

Since 2018, we’ve seen three new open-source frameworks – Micronaut, Helidon and Quarkus – emerge to complement the already existing Java middleware open-source products such as Open Liberty, WildFly, Payara and Tomitribe. We have also seen the emergence of GraalVM, a polyglot virtual machine and platform created by Oracle Labs that, among other things, can convert applications to native code.

Now, the InfoQ eMag is introducing some of these microservices frameworks, MicroProfile, a set of APIs that optimizes enterprise Java for a microservices architecture, and GraalVM.

• The InfoQ eMag – Building Microservices in Java include:
  Spring Boot Tutorial: Building Microservices Deployed to Google Cloud – In this tutorial, the reader will get a chance to create a small Spring Boot application, containerize it and deploy it to Google Kubernetes Engine using Skaffold and the Cloud Code IntelliJ plugin.
• Getting Started with Quarkus: Quarkus created quite a buzz in the enterprise Java ecosystem in 2019. What exactly is Quarkus? How is it different from other technologies established in the market? How can Quarkus help me or my organization? To better explain the motivation behind the Quarkus project, we need to look into the current state of software development.
• Project Helidon Tutorial: Building Microservices with Oracle’s Lightweight Java Framework – Oracle introduced its new open-source framework, Helidon, in September 2018. Originally named Java for Cloud, Helidon is a collection of Java libraries for creating microservices-based applications.
• Virtual Panel: the MicroProfile Influence on Microservices Frameworks – In mid-2016, the MicroProfile initiative was created as a collaboration of vendors to deliver microservices for enterprise Java. InfoQ recently asked the opinion of expert practitioners on how MicroProfile has influenced how developers today are building microservices-based applications, the emergence of new microservices frameworks and reverting back to monolith-based applications development.