Oracle Developer Meetup – London Feb 19

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by mp3monster in Dev Meetup, development, General, Helidon, Oracle, Technology

Tags

developer, GitHub, Helidon, meetup, micro profile, Microservices, open tracing, Oracle, signatures

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.

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 micro-service 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:

Tracing (using Zipkin leveraging the Open Tracing Standard)
Dynamic configuration
Security (including Signatures)
Fault Handling (just MP)

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

In addition to Helidon itself on GitHub, there are 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 mp3monster in General, Helidon

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Helidon, java, micro profile, Oracle

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)