NullAway VS Micronaut

Fortunately, Uber made tooling for languages with broken type systems

* https://github.com/uber/NullAway

* https://github.com/uber-go/nilaway

Some patterns arise from language design

* You can't express `T` where `null` is forbidden in the type system so you get NullPointerException everywhere and defensive null checks.

* You express a sum type as a product type because your language does not have sum types .

* Your language doesn't have first class multiple return values (or tuples) so you return extra parameters via out parameters or thread local variables such as `errno`.

* Your language doesn't have exceptions (or algebraic effects) and can't do IO so you have monad transformers.

* Your language doesn't have set-theoretic types so you need hacks like `thiserror` .

* Your language doesn't have stackful coroutines or can't infer async IO for you so you have `async/await` spam or callback hell or "mono's".

* Your language doesn't have exhaustive checks (or pattern matching) so you need a fallthrough case check on switch statements .

* Your language doesn't have algebraic effects, so you need to pass context everywhere.

I know someone will reply about Java's null annotation checking options, so here is one of them: https://github.com/uber/NullAway .

If you must use Java, use Uber's Nullaway which gives null safety via Errorprone.

Does anyone have experience using this at Meta who can compare to https://github.com/uber/NullAway ?

A special kind of validation is enforcing that record fields are not null. (Un)fortunately, records do not have any special behavior regarding nullability. You can use tools like NullAway or Error Prone to prevent null in your code in general, or you can add checks to your records:

What do you think of https://github.com/uber/NullAway

Take a look at NullAway, a plugin for Error Prone.

PMD, Spotbugs, Nullaway: Java linting/static analysis (https://pmd.github.io, https://spotbugs.github.io, https://github.com/uber/NullAway)

Micronaut has a share of the space too.

https://micronaut.io/

However, you’re right that Spring Boot has the lions share of the Java ecosystem.

I've used vert.x in a big project once. I don't ever want to do that again. Performance is pretty good, but the developer experience is beyond clunky.

My current favourite Java server framework is Micronaut.

Great performance and easy to develop for!

https://micronaut.io/

I wonder how much you'd save with Micronaut: https://micronaut.io/

> Micronaut is a software framework for the Java virtual machine platform. It is designed to avoid reflection, thus reducing memory consumption and improving start times. Features which would typically be implemented at run-time are instead pre-computed at compile time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronaut_(framework)

I don't think you'd go down to 9, but something like 20-30 could be doable.

I'd like to introduce my project. It is called mlfx. It can compile FXML ahead of time. It is basically an annotation processor, which internally uses Micronaut framework's AST abstraction and compiles fxml files directly to JVM bytecode. This decreases UI load time and also helps with native-image reflection configs. It also has some compliance tests that load compiled code and check resulting object graph against one loaded by javafx-xml. It also has some drawbacks now, but, please, read README. Now I'm successfully using it in two production projects.

https://micronaut.io/ https://quarkus.io/

when it comes to full stack frameworks, Micronaut(https://micronaut.io/) is actually good and pleasant to work with.

For the server Quarkus and Micronaut might be interesting besides Spring Boot. Quarkus is more popular and backed by RedHat (so probably here to stay).

🥇 Spring Boot 🥈 Quarkus 🥉 Micronaut 🏅 Ktor 🏅 http4k

Spring boot is still The King. Although I've not done more than hello world with Micronaut, it might have easier learning curve than Spring (and concepts are similar to Spring so you can carry over later to learn Spring). It could also be a useful skill in world of microservices these days.