News

Oracle Joins the Micronaut Foundation

• By John K. Waters
• October 12, 2022

Oracle has joined the Micronaut Foundation, the not-for-profit organization established to advance innovation and adoption of the Micronaut Framework, an open-source, JVM-based, full-stack framework for building modular microservices and serverless applications. Oracle joined as an engineering partner, the company announced last week.

The Micronaut Foundation was established in 2020 by Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) a technology consulting company that serves as the steward of the framework. The organization builds and supports an ecosystem of documentation, functionality, and services, and it promotes and evangelizes the framework as a leading technology in the JVM space.
OCI also founded the Grails Foundation to support innovation and adoption of the open-source Grails web app framework.

"The formation of the [Micronaut] Foundation reflects the growing need to balance the diverse range of interests from the Micronaut community and contributing organizations," said Graeme Rocher, co-founder of the Micronaut framework, when the foundation was announced in 2020. "As Micronaut’s adoption continues to accelerate, the additional governance provided by the foundation will ensure all interested parties have a voice, resulting in a much more inclusive approach to the direction of the project."

Unlike Spring Boot, which is another framework used in the development of microservices (with the Spring Framework), Micronaut was designed to take advantage of Java's annotations for injection (Spring Boot has its own).

"The Micronaut Framework’s elimination of runtime reflection, fast startup time, and low memory requirements make it an ideal choice when compiling applications into native executables with GraalVM Native Image for deployment on cloud, in container, or as serverless functions," Shaun Smith, who leads product management of the GraalVM, noted in a blog post. "As an Engineering Partner, Oracle will continue to focus on expanding Micronaut’s ability to easily leverage cloud platform services to build truly cloud-native applications deployable on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and other cloud platforms."

Developed by Oracle Labs, GraalVM is the company's high-performance JDK distribution written in Java and other JVM languages.

Oracle was one of the first to join the foundation's new Engineering Partner program, which "recognizes partner organizations that sponsor the full-time work of one or more members of the Micronaut framework core committer team, with a focus on the critical shared and common portions of the code base," OCI said in a blog post. Oracle has been an active contributor to the Micronaut framework since 2020.

"Micronaut has been a leader in bringing Java to the cloud," said Eric Sedlar, Vice President and Technical Director of Oracle Labs, in a statement. "Micronaut identified build-time processing as a key technique required for the cloud, and has been consistently pushing the limit on bringing the features Java developers love into a build-time environment. For that reason, GraalVM and Micronaut are a natural partnership to make developers productive with Java in the cloud."

Sergio del Amo, Micronaut Product Tech Lead at OCI, said in a statement that Oracle's contribution to the framework has made the company "a crucial player in the journey of the framework so far.

"Oracle joining the Micronaut Foundation can only mean better collaboration," del Amo said. "Thus, I am looking forward to continuing working with them. Their innovation and engineering talent will make the Micronaut framework’s future even brighter." 

According to OCI, the Micronaut Framework has seen significant adoption within the JVM community and it's getting rave reviews. The Micronaut core has 3.8k stars on GitHub, for example, and more than 200 contributors. Micronaut is currently being used in production at Alibaba, Target, Minecraft, and Boeing, among others, the company says.

Among the support services the foundation provides is the Micronaut Gitter Channel, an open forum for general questions and discussion about the framework. The channel connects community members via chat with the Micronaut development team and other community members. OCI encourages members of the Micronaut community to use this forum "when seeking technical support around a question that is likely to involve a discussion." There's also a blog that posts updated on " all framework-related news, releases, events, publications, and more."