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Stripped and ready to go: Enterprise Java MicroProfile lands

Red Hat and IBM make their microservices play

The project for a lightweight and modular enterprise Java suited to microservices has hit general release.

MicroProfile 1.0 has now hit general availability, just over two months after the project was unveiled by representatives of IBM, Red Hat, Tomitribe, Payara and the London Java Community on June 27.

A formal announcement is expected at Oracle’s annual JavaOne conference in San Francisco next week.

MicroProfile has already seen early initial implementations by Red Hat in its WildFly Swarm microservices runtime and IBM in its Liberty WebSphere Application Server.

The speedy delivery of MicroProfile 1.0 was enabled in part by the fact MicroProfile uses existing elements of the Java EE stack. The group worked on utilizing JAX-RS, CDI and JSON-P.

Long term, the idea is to agree key interfaces and specifications. These will be wrapped into different MicroProfiles, meaning a choice of packages so people aren’t compelled to swallow to the full fat Java EE stack. You’d then certify against the MicroProfile to demonstrate compliance.

Discussions are now underway for MicroProfile 2.0. Talks are spanning the addition of asynchronous reactive event processing, big data and some form of support for the Netflix open source software projects. There’s no date for version 2.0.

Oracle is not a member of the MicroProfile project.

Asked during a Java Community Process (JCP) meeting on August 9 whether Oracle planed to collaborate with the MicroProfile team, Oracle hedged.

Anil Gaur, Oracle group vice president with responsibility for Java EE and WebLogic Server, told the group he'd like to see "the two efforts come together" and had spoken to Red Hat. However, there was no definitive answer at that time.

The size of things Java is an age-old issue – as, too, is concern about the speed of development of the language and various runtimes and their ability to keep current with changing trends in software and among developers.

During the mid 2000s, the concern was Java language and JDK were getting fat, and there was a growing appetite to place them on an API diet. ®

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