Oracle has released Helidon 2.0, an upgrade to its Java libraries designed to simplify microservices development. The upgrade brings GraalVM Native Image startup and memory consumption benefits to MicroProfile developers.
Helidon 2.0 was announced on June 24. The project features Helidon SE, which is a set of reactive, non-blocking libraries for functional programming, and Helidon MP, which is a declarative programming version that implements the Eclipse MicroProfile APIs.
Available on GitHub, Helidon 2.0 brings GraalVM Native Image support to Helidon MP; this was already supported in Helidon SE. The upgrade also has an early-access version of a command line tool to help start projects, manage dependencies, and build applications using different packaging profiles including JAR, native image, and jlink image.
Helidon is intended for building new microservices as well as for extending existing applications. The technology offers a collection of libraries and a reactive web server running on a Netty network application framework core. Health checks, metrics, tracing, and fault tolerance are offered.
Other new, production-ready capabilities in Helidon 2.0 include:
- ”Easy” generation of jlink custom runtime images, with support for CDS archives, to improve startup performance.
- Jakarta Websocket support.
- Helidon MP adds MicroProfile Reactive Streams Operators and MicroProfile Reactive Streams Messaging.
- Support for Java 11.
Early-access capabilities in Helidon 2.0 include:
- Helidon SE adds a reactive framework with new Reactive Streams and Reactive Messaging features.
- A DB Client for Helidon SE offers a reactive, non-blocking database client to be used with existing blocking JDBC drivers. It also supports the MongoDB reactive driver.
- Helidon SE adds a reactive WebClient for non-blocking HTTP access to external services.