Category Archives: Helidon

Oracle Groundbreakers Podcast – Helidon

21 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by in APIs & microservices, development, General, Helidon, Oracle, Technology

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One of the things I am fortunate enough to get involved with on occasion is the Oracle Groundbreakers Podcast (previously known as the Oracle Developer Podcast) and something I have written about in the past, even as Oracle Developer Community (ODC) Appreciation Day post.

As a result of the recent Meetups on the subject of Helidon that have been occurring recently, we made the suggestion that Helidon be the subject of a Groundbreaker’s Podcast, net result I was invited to be part of the panel.  The podcast was recorded a few weeks ago, and know available (here). Go check it out, as it includes the key contributors to the project Dmitry Kornilov and Tomas Langer.

GBPodcast-image-365

Oracle Developer Meetup – London Feb 19

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Dev Meetup, development, General, Helidon, Oracle, Technology

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Last night was the first Oracle Developer Meetup in London for 2019.  We were very fortunate to have Tomas Langer fly over to talk about the new micro container/framework being developed as an open source solution by Oracle.

Oracle Developer Meet-up - Tomas Langer presenting on Helidon

Tomas, opened by explaining the evolution of the micro-profile being championed by the Eclipse Foundation who are now the guardians of J2EE also known as Jakarta and how the J2EE and Micro-Profile standards compare (in simplistic terms – micro-profile is J2EE stripped back to be simple and support what is typically needed in a microservice world).

The presentation then went onto compare Helidon SE and Helidon MP (micro-profile).  What was really pleasing is that with a couple of exceptions everything that Helidon MP can do, can be done in the SE edition, the difference being that for SE you have to implement more code, rather than the auto-magic of annotations, but in return you have a Reactive Java platform with a development paradigm which relates to JavaScript Express.

In addition to talking about what can be done, Tomas described the kinds of features being developed, this includes:

  • Bringing micro-profile support up to the very latest specification,
  • More reactive persistence technologies support,

With the scene set, Tomas then worked through a series of live code scenarios starting with a clean slate and building Hello World in both the SE & MP models illustrating the differences in approach.  This was then built upon to add the following capabilities:

You can get the complete example which uses Helidon in both configurations from Tomas GitHub.

In addition to Helidon itself on GitHub, there resources provided include rich documentation and examples of each key feature.  Plus a Slack community, that if you contact any of the Helidon team will get you invited allowing you to discuss with the development team how to do things along with other developers using Helidon.

Tomas can be contracted via @Langer_Tomas.  Helidon project also has its own Twitter account – Helidon Project

Helidon itself can be found at:

I have previously blogged on Helidon at Exploring Helidon – Part 1

 

Exploring Helidon – Part 1

01 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by in General, Helidon

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So I recently blogged (here) about the announcement of Helidon – the open source project from Oracle to provide a microservice app server that includes optional support for the J2EE Microprofile.

This is the first of what will probably become a series of blogs about Helidon, particularly in its SE form (non J2EE Micro-Profile) as Micro Profile and the wider J2EE model in general will have been documented more widely.

Hello World

Helidon comes with a quick start example app implemented both in SE and MP forms.  It is worth following the very simple instructions provided by the Helidon site to instantiate both versions of the Hello World app as it provides a good way to start to understand the differences in the way Helidon can be used.

The thing that really jumps out when you compare the code (for me at least) is the fact that the SE code being driven from values loading from configuration is more dynamic. The configuration can be sourced in a number of different ways from YAML files to etcd.So for our for first experiment we took the hello World app, and made the path /greet dynamic by loading the path from from some additional configuration. Enhancing the main with :

private static Routing createMultiRouting() {
Map greetingConfig = Config.create().get(“greeting”).asMap();
Routing.Builder routing = Routing.builder();
if (!greetingConfig.isEmpty())
{
greetingConfig.forEach((k,v)->
{
System.out.println (“Read config value>” + k + “=” + v + “<“);
// as the key is the fully qualified name, I just want the last piece,
// so let’s strip it to be a substring
String key = (String)k;
key = key.substring(key.lastIndexOf(“.”)+1);
// each different URI should have its own instance of the Greet Service
// with its tailored key which will mean it responds with the key e.g. France
routing.register(JsonSupport.get())
.register(“/”+v, new GreetService(key));
});
}
else
{
System.out.println(“No config\n”);
}
return routing.build();
}
 

We can create URLs for greetings in different languages, and see the different instances of the Service object responding to the web calls. Whilst many may associate this approach with Node.js for me it felt more like the webserver multiplexer (MUX) such as Gorilla used with Go (you can see what I mean here).

Helidon and On the Road

Two of the leading figures Tomas Langer and Dmitry Kornikov will be presenting at a number of meet-ups in Europe, including the London Meetup (go here)

Part 1?

Yes, I will be blogging more about Helidon as soon as I can, but presently wrapping up a white paper and running an API Design training session soon.

Helidon and the embracing of micro services

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in development, General, Helidon, Oracle, Technology

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XEYO9H51_400x400Oracle have announced another Open Source project called Helidon (Helidon.io) as a microservices platform built on top of Netty (which is built around a contemporary async model). If you look at the literature you’ll note two flavours one called SE which aligns to the programming characteristics or Node.js – asynchronous. The other is MP which aligns to the rapidly evolving J2EE MicroProfile which essentially follows a coding style along the lines of J2EE annotations.

Whilst it is perfectly possible to run Helidon based solutions in either profile natively, it is clearly geared up for running in any Docker+Kubernetes style environments such as Oracle Kubernetes Cloud (OKE) or even ACCS. Helidon website provides the means to quickly package your solution into Docker.

In both SE and MP forms the dependencies are hugely stripped back compared to the giants of WebLogic, GlassFish (now EE4J with the handover of J2EE to the Eclipse Foundation.

It does raise a number of questions what are the futures of WebLogic and Oracle support of EE4J (some answers here, but no Oracle specific)? WebLogic has never been the fastest to align to the latest J2EE standards (EE8 standard released last year should be become available sometime this year for WLS – see here), but today it is so central to many Oracle products it isn’t going to disappear, will it just end up slowly ebbing away? Which would be a shame, I have heard it said by Oracle insiders that if the removing the end of one component could be sorted then WebLogic could be easily be configured to have a small lightweight foot print.

The other interesting thing is what is happening to Open Source and what it might mean for the future.  Up until perhaps 3 or 4 years ago the use of open source you would think of software made available on of a small group of key sponsored organisations such as Apache, Linux Foundation, Eclipse which through its governance framework, provided levels of equality and process. As result, levels of quality, trust crucially married to strong level of use and contribution that meant that to extrapolate Linus’ Law – bugs could be weeded out quickly and easily.  However with the advent of services like GitHub, whilst it has become easier to contribute and fulfill Linus’ Law. It also means that it is very easy to offer a solution that is Open Source. But, doesn’t necessarily garner the benefits of Linus’ Law and the other preconceptions we often have about Open Source such as it is/can be as good as a commercial solution. After all, throwing code into GitHub does not guarantee the many eyes/contributors. Nor does it assure the governance, checks and balances that an Apache project for example will assure.

It is important to say that I am not against github, in fact I am very much pro, and use GitHub myself to host utilities I make freely available (here). The important point is we have to be more aware of what open source actually means, in each context and can’t assume it is likely to have a strong community driving things forward, and critically dealing with bugs, and ensuring quality assurance processes are realized.

Helidon joins a number of other offerings in this space such as Micronaut (also built on Netty). Micronaut takes a different approach to Helidon by adopting a strong inversion of control / injection approach. In and in some respects feels a bit like the earlier versions of JBoss Application Server (now known as WildFly) which had a small footprint and made good use of Spring. This is in addition to Spark and Javalin. There is a good illustration of the different servers from Dmitry Kornilov  shown below and the associated article can be seen here (who also happens to the Lead Engineer for Helidon).

helidon_landscape

Unlike Spark, Micronaut and a couple of others, Helidon only supports Java today rather than JDK based languages such as Kotlin and Groovy for example, but is the only solution that can cover both the Micro Profile and Framework domains. It also has a challenge in terms of getting established, Spark has been around since 2015. Javalin appeared in May 2017. The J2EE Micro Profile standard is also driving a lot forward progress, so getting established will continue to get harder. Liberty, another Micro Profile solution is based on IBM WebSphere and Thorntail has links to WildFly (more here). We hope that it will make good headway with a Reactive engine in the form of Netty and avoiding IoC or introspection from the core should mean it will be very quick (particularly during startup) but it needs to show its value differentiation and importantly build a strong community contributing to it.

We hopefully will get the chance to further experiment with Helidon and write more about it here.