State Of The Micronaut

We at Object Computing and the Micronaut Foundation, led by Graeme and myself, remain committed to our growing community and continuing to advance what we have built here. Our focus continues to be building and helping our community create better technology. This is what we do and will continue to do. The community is an important part of this journey for us — the most important part of the journey. Our commitment to honor and serve this community continues to grow.

In May of 2018 Object Computing was very happy to release the Micronaut® framework to the open source community. We grew the framework from that first milestone release, to a 1.0 release, and through a series of 1.x point releases. Micronaut 1 has been a true game changer: the way that enterprises build microservices has changed; the way frameworks are implemented has changed; some perceptions about the JVM have even changed.

Micronaut 1 was truly groundbreaking. In June of 2020 we released Micronaut 2.0, upgrading the framework to support even more integrations with cloud services, further improving performance which was already great, adding more serverless capabilities, etc. Micronaut 2 is yet another significant leap forward.

The Micronaut framework has upended how developers approach framework design in server-side Java. By shifting framework infrastructure into a compiler feature, the Micronaut framework rewrites the book on how frameworks should be built in the post-Java EE world. The Micronaut framework eliminates the need to use complex runtime Java container technologies to obtain features like AOP, transaction management, caching, and more. The Micronaut framework has demonstrated that the future is intelligent compilers and smaller, faster runtimes.

Since inception, the Micronaut framework has enjoyed massive enthusiasm, engagement, and adoption within the JVM community. For example, Micronaut core has 3.8k stars on GitHub and more than 200 contributors. Micronaut is being used in production at Alibaba, Target, Minecraft, Boeing, and many other organizations.

We recently announced The Micronaut Foundation. The foundation is supported by a Technology Advisory Board, which includes technology leaders from a number of organizations around the world and diverse segments of industry.

Object Computing has committed the initial funding of USD $2M to fund development and evangelism of the framework through the foundation.

Over the past several months, we have received great enthusiasm from several technology (in particular cloud) vendors, and Oracle is among them. To support key advocates of the Micronaut framework within Oracle, and to demonstrate the viability and stability of doubling down on the Micronaut framework as a core component of the Oracle stack, Graeme Rocher has made the decision to join Oracle Labs, to help drive adoption and advancement of the Micronaut framework within Oracle.

The Micronaut Foundation is the next step in the evolution of the framework and, we believe, of the way that software is created in the JVM ecosystem. Through the shared insights, perspectives, and experiences of our Foundation’s Technology Advisory Board, the Micronaut framework will be able to support more environments, more features, more developers, and more use cases than previously imagined.

Hopefully we will also continue to see more organizations like Object Computing invest in the future of the core framework as it continues to grow and evolve. All of us is better than any one of us.