Explore Micronaut

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Microservice framework suggested by @jaeddy

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Already ticket 300!

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At outset, Spring Boot is still leading in many aspects with the support of vast experience it acquired in handling Microservices over the years. But Micronaut( Young chap) is promising and promising enough to give tough competition to Spring Boot.

Source: Spring Boot vs Micronaut — The battle unleashed

Instead of using reflection at runtime, which is expensive, both frameworks (Micronaut and Quarkus) generate extra classes at build time. This also allows us to avoid classpath scanning at startup time. In short, the idea is about making as much code as possible available at build time.

Micronaut is a good alternative to Spring Boot. Migrating from the latter to the former is pretty straightforward. One just needs to be aware of the gap between the conventions of the two stacks.

Source: From Spring Boot to Micronaut

Micronaut is still in an emerging state and is proving its mettle. It is just a matter of time before it gains the huge recognition it deserves. And with GraalVM, it is an absolute beast!!!

Source: Issues with Spring, how Micronaut solves it, and latter’s support for GraalVM

Spring

• GitHub org
  • 38 developers

Pinned repos (see stars and forks):

Micronaut

• GitHub org
  • 7 developers

Pinned repos (see stars and forks):

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Google Trends

Source: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=micronaut,spring%20boot,quarkus

Community size

Micronaut core has 3.8 thousand stars on GitHub and more than 200 contributors. Micronaut is being used in production at Alibaba, Target, Minecraft, Boeing, and many other organizations.

MvnRepository Rank:

• spring-boot: #145
• micronaut-core: #10283

Advantages of Spring

• Larger community
• Framework is battle-tested
• Spring Boot provides more ways to handle with properties when we compared it against Micronaut.
• Spring Boot is leading in supporting caching providers
• Spring Boot provides additional options to monitor the application when compared with Micronaut.

Advantages of micronaut

• Cloud Native Java microservices (Spring need 3rd party packages)
• AOT compilation that lead to shorter launch time and smaller memory footprint. This is especially relevant when Kubernetes pods and other instances running the microservices are frequently started and shutdown to scale with demand + spot instances.

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Conclusions (June 2022)

The two main advantages of Micronaut over Spring is improved performance - apps start faster and have lower memory footprint - thanks to AOT compilation and native integration with cloud services such as service discovery, Eureka, load balancing, serverless functions that can be deployed to the AWS Lambda and any FaaS system that supports running functions as containers. The main drawbacks are its much smaller community, the lack of examples and the lack of management and monitoring tools.

The reasons I will continue to use Spring to develop microservices are:

• Spring has a much larger community and example applications
• Software Engineers in the Platform team and possibly Web Engineering are already using Spring.
• At this stage of the development of the backend, the improved performance of Micronaut does not outweighs its drawbacks (even though I a fan of their decision to adopt AOT compilation).
• We have committed to the development of a portal challenge platform in the ITCR-DREAM award. This limits the Cloud Enabled benefit of Micronaut.