javalin VS initializr

If you've read this far, you might be interested to know that Javalin has been offering Brotli compression through jvm-brotli for three years already, and that there have been no (reported) issues. In other words, the effort required to release and maintain this is probably not huge.

I'm a big fan of Ktor (ktor.io) but another reasonable lightweight alternative is Javelin (https://javalin.io/). Heck even Spring Boot isn't that bad. HikariCP + JooQ (has both java and kotlin codegen) for DB access if you need and you're good to go.

A similar alternative that does not rely on web sockets is https://htmx.org. I have greatly enjoyed using it with some simpler web frameworks like https://javalin.io to do some prototyping and smaller projects. I'm sure if someone made a plug and play UI library like material UI for Angular on top of htmx you could absolutely fly through MVPs.

Javalin

If you're already familiar with most of the concepts around HTTP and web services, I'd recommend using something like https://javalin.io/ which is light weight frame work that makes getting something up and running quickly a very easy task.

I've been looking at https://javalin.io/ Seems close enough to express and some big names are using it, so I wouldn't say it's fizzling out

Javalin (https://javalin.io) is strongly inspired by Express and Koa, so you should feel right at home:

If you want to do a proper comparison between the two, I would be happy to help with code examples from Javalin's side. I could even host it on https://javalin.io as a "Comparison to Jooby" blog post.

The best way, for generating a ready-to-run application in Java you can use the Spring Boot Initializr tool.

curl --location 'https://start.spring.io/starter.zip?type=maven-project&language=java&bootVersion=3.2.2&baseDir=ms-xcoffee&groupId=com.xcoffee&artifactId=ms-xcoffee&name=ms-xcoffee&description=Demo%20project%20for%20Spring%20Boot&packageName=com.xcoffee.ms-xcoffee&packaging=jar&javaVersion=21&dependencies=webflux%2Clombok%2Cvalidation' | tar -xzvf -

In this segment we will create a basic Spring boot app from Spring Initializer. Add the below dependencies:

Add the following MongoDB dependencies in your pom.xml or use spring initializer and select the Spring Data MongoDB dependency:

I created all of these applications using start.spring.io's REST API and HTTPie.

An easy way to create the skeleton project is to visit Spring Initializr, I set the Project to Gradle - Groovy, Language to Java, and add Spring Web dependency. Then it's just to generate the project and unpack it.

Create a new Spring Boot application using the Spring Initializr. You can use the web version or the curl command below. Use the default for most of the options. For the dependencies, select web, and okta. For the build tool, select Gradle.

I will start with a simple example of a cloud function, which is the same as a rest endpoint in the classical spring boot web application. You can create a project from your favorite IDE or from Spring Initliazr.