What are the reasons to pick up MicroProfile?

[Shai Almog]

I wasn't able to keep up with the developments in MicroProfile in the past few years so this books sounds interesting to me.

I've been a heavy JavaEE user but in recent years moved completely into Spring Boot and am pretty heavily invested there.

The obvious advantage MicroProfile has is as a multi-vendor standard. What are the other big reasons for me to pick up MicroProfile?

[Andy McCright]

Multi-vendor support is definitely a huge benefit for MicroProfile. Like Java EE (now Jakarta EE), you can easily port your application code from one vendor to another with very little changes (I'd like to say that no change necessary, but the reality is that specs are imperfect so there will usually be something that vendor A does a little differently than vendor B - for that matter, those differences might be the reason for choosing one vendor over another...).

Other than that, I'd say that the technologies themselves are beneficial.  I work primarily with the MP Rest Client (a type-safe client similar to Spring's REST template) and MP GraphQL (an annotation-based GraphQL implementation).  The Rest Client addresses some of the gaps in Jakarta's JAX-RS - making it easy and more-domain-friendly to consume remote services.  MP GraphQL takes concepts from JAX-RS (or Spring MVC REST) to build services that address gaps in REST itself.  I'd definitely encourage you to check out these technologies if you are not familiar with them - we also cover them in detail in the book.

Aside from those technologies, MP has a lot of cloud-native technologies that Java/Jakarta EE has needed for some time.  MP Config allows you to customize your application and the server framework from sources like Kubernetes.  MP Metrics enables you to instantly see performance-related details from your services - and it comes with APIs that you can use in your app to track even more details.  MP Health enables plug-points with Kubernetes so that it knows when to route traffic to your VM.  MP Fault Tolerance provides APIs for handling outages of local and remote resources - circuit breakers, bulkheads, etc.  MP OpenAPI is basically a vendor-neutral version of Swagger that allows you to easily document your services' RESTful endpoints. All good stuff!

If you have any questions on anything in specific, please let me know. - thanks!  - Andy

[Emily Jiang]

Shai Almog wrote:I wasn't able to keep up with the developments in MicroProfile in the past few years so this books sounds interesting to me.

I've been a heavy JavaEE user but in recent years moved completely into Spring Boot and am pretty heavily invested there.

The obvious advantage MicroProfile has is as a multi-vendor standard. What are the other big reasons for me to pick up MicroProfile?

If you think about the advantages over Spring, the MicroProfile and Spring Comparison blog might be able to help you.

[Emily Jiang]

The other attractive fact with MicroProfile is that it is truely open and fast. It focuses on the application side and tries to stay lean. The fact of many modern runtimes adopt it drives the innovation fast and vendor neutral. It does not try to overlap with cloud infrastruture but reacts fast to cloud infrastructure updates. The technologies have zero entry for Java EE developers. I think you will be able to grasp it in no time given you were a Java EE developer. In order to learn MicroProfile technologies, you might find these guides on Open Liberty useful.