As many of us in the development community know, Micronaut® is a free and open public-use software development framework that is used to build modular, easily-testable microservice and serverless applications.
What some might not know is the history behind the development of Micronaut or what its future holds. The pursuit to create Micronaut began with development in 2017 when Object Computing Inc. (OCI) set out to build an intelligent compiler that precomputed framework infrastructure to achieve the same productivity benefits gained from Spring® without the runtime overhead. OCI first released Micronaut in May 2018, and in just two years’ time, Micronaut has significantly evolved into a technology that has redefined expectations for how these types of frameworks function with respect to important characteristics, such as startup time and memory consumption for microservices and serverless applications.
Micronaut has upended how developers approach framework design in server-side Java. By shifting framework infrastructure into a compiler feature, Micronaut has rewritten the book on how frameworks should be built in the post-Java EE world. Micronaut eliminates the need to use complex runtime Java container technologies to obtain features like AOP, transaction management, caching, and more. Micronaut has demonstrated that the future is intelligent compilers and smaller, faster runtimes.
Since its inception, Micronaut has enjoyed massive enthusiasm, engagement, and adoption within the JVM community. For example, Micronaut core has 3.8 thousand stars on GitHub and more than 200 contributors. Micronaut is being used in production at Alibaba, Target, Minecraft, Boeing, and many other organizations. Micronaut is licensed under the very liberal Apache 2 License.
Given the growing popularity of Micronaut, OCI has now taken on this initiative to lead the formation of the new Micronaut Foundation. The Micronaut Foundation oversees software roadmap and development, best practices and processes, repository control, documentation and support, and fundraising related to the open-source framework.
The official mission of the Micronaut Foundation is to:
“Ensure technical innovation and advancement of Micronaut as a free and open public-use software development framework for a growing global community.
Evangelize and promote the Micronaut framework as a leading technology in the JVM space
Build and support an ecosystem of complementary documentation, functionality, and services”
The Micronaut Foundation is supported by a Technology Advisory Board that ensures the framework continues to reflect and serve its diverse and growing user community. The Technology Advisory Board is composed of key project contributors and partners in the ecosystem, including:
Graeme Rocher, Micronaut Foundation, co-founder and Director
Jeff Scott Brown, Micronaut Foundation, co-founder and Director, Micronaut Practice Lead at Object Computing
James Kleeh, Object Computing, Micronaut Development Lead
Ken Sipe, Mesosphere, Cloud Solutions Architect
Neal Ford, ThoughtWorks, Director, Cloud Architect
Zhamak Dehghani, ThoughtWorks, Principal Consultant
Guillaume Laforge, Google Cloud Platform, Developer Advocate
Venkat Subramaniam, Agile Developer Inc., Founder
Yuriy Artamonov, JetBrains, Microservices Fellow
With the new Foundation underway, the future looks even brighter for Micronaut and its users.
Jeff Scott Brown is a Partner, the Micronaut and Grails Practice Lead at Object Computing, and the Director and Co-Founder of the Micronaut Foundation.
Jeff Scott Brown has been doing JVM application development for as long as the JVM has existed. He has spent most of the last decade focused specifically on work related to the Grails framework and has been a key contributor to the frameworks’ core development. More recently, Jeff co-founded the Micronaut framework, and he currently leads Object Computing's Grails and Micronaut practices, which includes supervising and supporting a distributed team of elite engineers dedicated to maintaining, improving, and expanding both frameworks. Jeff co-authored The Definitive Guide to Grails Second Edition and The Definitive Guide to Grails 2 in partnership with Grails and Micronaut co-founder, Graeme Rocher.
Jeff regularly presents talks and workshops on Grails, Micronaut, Groovy, and other JVM-related technologies at events and private engagements worldwide. You can find Jeff on Twitter @jeffscottbrown