News

Micronaut Blueprint for JHipster Update

• By John K. Waters
• April 27, 2021

Tech consulting firm Object Computing (OCI) has announced the 1.0.0 release of the Micronaut Blueprint for JHipster.

The blueprint (called "MHipster" internally) was designed to provide users of the JHipster Java development platform with key features and integrations to help them deploy their applications to production quickly.

JHipster provides a set of tools and methods for generating, developing, and deploying modern web applications and microservice architectures. The platform provides a ready-to-use frontend to manage domain entities, and developers use it to quickly evolve a domain model, and to test, monitor, and deploy applications easily to production.

Object Computing's  Micronaut framework is a modern Java Virtual Machine (JVM) application toolkit optimized for runtime performance. The framework is used by developers to build applications for cloud environments with fast start-up times, high throughput, and a low memory footprint. It is integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, and Oracle Cloud.

"This release represents a culmination of effort and teamwork between the Micronaut Foundation, the JHipster community, and Object Computing to create a Micronaut option for the server-side portion of JHipster applications," explained Jason Schindler, principal software engineer and partner at Object Computing, and Frederik Hahne, software developer at WPS Management GmbH, in a blog post.

The Micronaut Blueprint for JHipster supports two application types: monoliths and microservice applications. The monolith type can be used for single standalone applications, the company says. Developers can define entities with validation rules and relationships to other entities and package in a user interface written in Angular or React. New applications can be configured to supply their own auth with JWT support or use OAuth 2.0 to allow another application (Keycloak is provided by default) to manage user credentials and access.

"Pick a SQL database and optionally a cache implementation, and your brand-new application is ready to go," Schindler and Hahne explained, "complete with Liquibase migration scripts to initialize your database structures, entity REST APIs for common CRUD operations, unit and integration tests, and (if you added a UI) an optional Protractor test suite!"

The microservice application type is similar to the monolith, the two developers said, with a few key differences: It does not include a user interface and it comes with service discovery via Consul or the JHipster Registry (backed by Eureka).

The blog post provides a detailed walk-through on generating a new application using the mhipster command line tool.

The JHipster Micronaut Blueprint is an open-source project released under the Apache 2.0 license. The project is hosted under the JHipster GitHub organization, and contributions are welcome. (Contributing documentation is available on GitHub.)