Lightbend Lagom Microservices with Java 8
There’s currently a lot of buzz around the notion of composing complex systems of reactive microservices. Certainly it’s not an entirely new idea, I’ve been building solutions along these design principles for many years but now we have been seeing quite mature tooling based on RESTful architectures emerge in the shape of Spring Boot and Typesafe Play.
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work on Spring Boot. I love it but it’s not reactive out-of-the box and Play was great but the Scala version was always the superior option. While I personally love Scala many of my clients don’t like developers using Scala on their projects as they worry about downstream support and the higher cost of Scala developers.
Well it seems that Typesafe, now re-branded as Lightbend also worried about this management mistrust of Scala and decided that they needed to create a Java 8 based api to replace Play so that they could capture the Java market. It’s interesting to note that there is still Scala under the covers and it is composed of some of their mature projects such as Akka to do the donkey-work but exposes reactive features through CompletableFuture and lambdas.
I’ve only watched the introductory videos and skimmed the documentation so far but it looks promising and I’m certainly going to devote some time to learning much more about this product. I’ll post more thoughts as I go.
