Several members of the MicroProfile community have recently launched a beta release of MicroProfile Starter, a website that allows you to generate and download a new MicroProfile project based on custom configuration options specified. MicroProfile Starter is conceptually similar to Spring Initializr (start.spring.io), in that it allows you to specify your project's coordinates (groupId and artifactId), which version of MicroProfile you'd like to use, your MicroProfile server, and a number of project configuration options.
According to discussion on the MicroProfile mailing list, David Blevins, CEO at Tomitribe, believes that the earliest mention of the idea of start.microprofile.io that he is aware of was at Devoxx BE 2016, from James Strachan, who is now employed as a distinguished engineer at CloudBees. The project has since evolved from here, with Ryan St. James, head of product design at Tomitribe, sharing a mockup of the UI in early December of last year. A team of MicroProfile community members -- including individual contributors and employees of Tomitribe, Red Hat and Payara -- have since implemented the UI, assocated backend services, and infrastructure, and the resulting website can now be viewed online:
The UI is dynamically updated based on configuration options you chose. Upon specifiying your configuration and clicking "Download" a project skeleton will be automatically generated, and the assocaiated bootstrap files and directory structure will be added to a ZIP file and downloaded.
Which MicroProfile version you select determines which servers are available. For instance, if you choose the oldest version (MP 1.2), you'll see a plethora of servers.
Select the latest version (MP 2.1) and you'll only see a couple of options (at the time of this writing).
One of the cool features of Spring Initializr is that it has a REST API you can use to create and download projects from the command line. For example:
http https://start.spring.io/starter.zip \ dependencies==h2,lombok,data-jpa,data-rest,web -d
The MicroProfile Starter does not have a similar feature at this time, but there is an open issue to add it. Other items on the roadmap include support for Java 11 and Gradle.
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Update 22nd Feb: This news item was corrected to make clear that members of the MicroProfile community created the project, rather than the Eclipse Foundationas as previously stated. Other minor edits have been made to add new information related to this. Apologies for any confusion caused.
