jZenith – an opinionated approach to building modern Java Microservices

So, after teasing about a Spring Boot for Vert.x I started coding a little bit. The result now runs under the name of jZenith.

It is a simple prototype with an example application that does simple CRUD on a simple entity. But it already has a lot of things that I think are needed, plus some bugs and some nice technologies.

The overall app setup currently looks like this:

JZenith.application(args)
       .withPlugins(
         RestPlugin.withResources(UserResource.class)
                   .withMapping(NoSuchUserException.class, 404),
         PostgresqlPlugin.create()
       )
       .withModules(new ServiceLayerModule(), new PersistenceLayerModule(), new MapperModule())
       .withConfiguration("postgresql.database", "test")
       .withConfiguration("postgresql.username", "test")
       .withConfiguration("postgresql.password", "test")
       .run();

I exchanged a lot of the technologies I used over the last years, basically it is Guice based, which I still prefer to any other DI framework. On the Rest side it uses Resteasy, which someone thankfully pointed out to me has native support for RxJava based Resources, making for nice resources like this:

public Single<UserResponse> getUser(@NonNull @PathParam("id") final UUID id) {
    return userService.getById(id)
                      .map(userMapper::mapToUserResponse);
}

I’m basically using it right now to play around with other technologies and having a little fun with low-level stuff. It is a great learning experience. Most of the stuff is actually just glue code between the different frameworks. The only thing that is actually some code is the configuration system.

The next steps will be to get some of the kinks out of the libraries that I’m using and put a better abstraction on SQL based databases, then maybe one of the other databases like Cassandra. And I need to write more tests.

And it already has a website, thanks to github pages (jzenith.org) and a logo. Setting up a project has never been easier, unless the fact that it is really hard to find free .org domains nowadays.