Java finally gets microservices tools
Due in early March, Lagom is a microservices framework that lightens the burden of developing these microservices in Java. Built on the Scala functional language, open source Lagom acts as a development environment for managing microservices. APIs initially are provided for Java services, with Scala to follow.
The framework features Lightbend's Akka middleware technologies as well as its ConductR microservices deployment tool and Play Web framework. Applications are deployed to Lightbend's commercial Reactive platform for message-driven applications or via open source Akka.
Lightbend sees microservices as loosely coupled, isolated, single-responsibility services, each owning its own data and easily composed into larger systems. Lagom provides for asynchronous communications and event-sourcing, which is storing the event leading up to particular states in an event, company officials said.
Analyst James Governor of RedMonk sees an opportunity for Lagom. "The Java community needs good tools for creating and managing microservices architectures," he said. "Lagom is squarely aimed at that space."
Lagom would compete with the Spring Boot application platform in some areas, according to Governor. "It is early days for Lagom, but the design points make sense," he noted. Typesafe was focused on Scala, which was adopted in some industries, such as financial services, but never became mainstream, he argues. "So [the company now] is looking to take its experiences and tooling and make them more generally applicable with a Java-first strategy."