Typesafe which was renamed to Lightbend this February, is going to make the life of Java developers easier by launching its Lagom platform which will help them create and manage microservices tools.
With open source objects like Scala programming language, Akka event-driven middleware, Play framework, Slick database, sbt build tool, Scala IDE for eclipse, Typesafe Activator, and Typesafe Console, Lightbend was founded in 2011 by Scala programming language creator martin Ordersky, Akkamiddleware creator Jonas Bonér, and Paul Phillips.
“Microservices only makes sense as systems, they are collaborative in nature and it is in between the individual services that the most interesting and challenging things occur. Here we are entering the world of distributed systems, which is a very different world compared to monoliths and the individual services per se,” Lightbend VP of Marketing Kathleen Hayes said for The New Stack.
As the main contributor of Reactive Streams, Lighbend provides an open source platform for building Reactive programming applications for Java Virtual Machine. The 1.0.0 version of Reactive streams for JVM was released on April 30, 2015. Among the implementations included are Akka Streams, MongoDB, Ratpack, Reactive Rabbit- driver for RabbitMq?AMQP, Spring and Pivotal Project Reactor, Netflix RxJava, Slick 3.0, and Vert.x 3.0.
Lagom framework is also able to launch hundred of microservices through a single command. “Microservices-based systems involve up to hundreds of microservices. How do you build these systems without losing productivity. In Lagom, through a single command, you can spin up hundreds of services, and you do code reloading across all of them, integrate with your IDEs, and remain productive,” according to Jonas Bonér.
There is also a meaning behind the name of the framework- Lagom in Swedish means ‘just the right size’. “There has been a lot of discussion around the question of what is the right size for a microservice, how many lines of code should it be. And all of that is nonsense; it has nothing to do with size. So we came up with this name as a bit of a twist,” Bonér explained for The New Stack.
The framework which is expected to launch on March 9, 2016 is fully asynchronous, something that according to Jonas Bonér is not “natural for most Java developers."
For James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk, Lagom has a very good potential as it is offering the java community the right tools that can help them create and manage microservices architectures easier and faster. “It is early days for Lagom, but the design points make sense,” Governor said for InfoWorld. “So [the company now] is looking to take its experiences and tooling and make them more generally applicable with a Java-first strategy,” he added.
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