Which microservice framework is the best?

In this article we present the best microservice frameworks.

Use these open source toolkits to create reliable and lightweight microservices. Read on to discover the best microservice framework.

The rise of microservices

After several years of software development and maintenance, some business applications are proving to be laborious and too expensive to upgrade. This type of technological debt is a major difficulty that many companies encounter in the long run.

This often leads to the need to wipe out past development and rebuild the applications from scratch. The rise of microservice architecture is a response to this problem, and offers several ways to resolve it.

Microservice architecture enables the development, deployment and operational management of distributed applications, made up of services with complementary functionalities that are potentially heterogeneous and interoperable.

Microservices promote the independence of lifecycles, whether they are design, development or production deployment cycles.

They differ from service-oriented architecture (SOA), which has been widespread for about a decade in the following ways:

• They emerge from the search for practical agility and increased efficiency by precursors of Cloud Computing, such as Netflix, Amazon or Airbnb.
• They are naturally adapted to the Cloud, and are natively deployed on “Platforms as a Service” (PaaS).
• They do not depend in any way on a software publisher’s solution, such as an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and minimise the need for software integration (EAI), implementing decentralised solutions that are alternatives to the sophisticated functionalities of ESBs (mediation, service orchestration, etc.).

You may also want to check out this article about microservice frameworks to learn more.

And now, let’s see which microservice framework is the best!

Spring Boot

The Java world has been building Spring applications for a long time now. Spring Boot makes the process much easier by managing most of the configuration details for you. Spring Boot has been created to automate the start-up of any Spring project, not just microservices. To make things even simpler, once you’re finished with the application, Spring Boot connects with a web server and creates a JAR file that matches almost everything you need except the JVM. Think of it as the original Docker container.

Eclipse MicroProfile

In 2016, some of the fans in the Java Enterprise community analyzed and decided to clean up all the unnecessary elements of Java Enterprise Edition to allow users to create simple microservices with classic components. They discarded a surprising number of libraries, but kept some code for REST request processing, JSON analysis and dependency injection management. What they ended up calling Eclipse MicroProfile was a simple and fast tool.

Since then, the MicroProfile community has entered into a pact to release new versions every quarter while adding new code to allow microservices to run smoothly and securely. The development process and code structure will be very familiar to anyone who has lived in the Java EE world, but the endless configuration issues have been resolved. This is proof that you can learn new things from old developers.

Dropwizard

When Dropwizard first appeared in 2011, Java Enterprise developers realized how little code they really needed. The Dropwizard framework provided a very simple development model with many important decisions already made for you, and it has continued to do so. You add business logic and virtually everything else is configured for you according to convention. The result is small JAR files that users rent for quick start up.

The biggest limitation may be the lack of dependency injection. If you want to use it to make your code clean and loosely coupled, you have to add the libraries yourself. Dropwizard cannot do this, unlike Spring.

Restlet

The Restlet project offers one of the largest collections of features and connections. It is already integrated with libraries such as JavaMail, in case your microservice needs POP, IMAP or SMTP for a mail server, and Lucene/Solr, in case you want to create searchable indexes of large chunks of text and surrounding metadata.

The possibilities in Restlet are endless, as this stack usually supports several different options for each part. You do not need to use JSON, as the code will handle XML, CSV, YAML and a few other file types.

As you can see, there really is no best choice, as the framework should always be chosen to match individual needs. We hope that this list has made this task a bit easier for you!