Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) has announced the creation of the Micronaut Foundation, a not-for-profit company established to advance innovation and adoption of the Micronaut framework. The foundation will "oversee software roadmap and development, best practices and processes, repository control, documentation and support, and fundraising related to the open source framework." The foundation will receive initial funding of $2M from OCI for development and evangelism.
Formerly known as Project Particle, Micronaut is a full-stack JVM-based framework for creating microservices-based, cloud-native and serverless applications that can be written in Java, Groovy, and Kotlin. Micronaut was introduced in March 2018 and was subsequently open-sourced in May 2018.
A Technical Advisory Board, composed of key project contributors and partners, will steward and manage the foundation. Board members include:
- Graeme Rocher, co-founder and director of the Micronaut Foundation
- Jeff Scott Brown, co-founder and director of the Micronaut Foundation, Micronaut practice lead at Object Computing
- James Kleeh, Micronaut development lead at Object Computing
- Ken Sipe, cloud solutions architect at Mesosphere
- Neal Ford, director and cloud architect at ThoughtWorks
- Zhamak Dehghani, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks
- Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer Inc.
- Yuriy Artamonov, microservices fellow at JetBrains
- Guillaume Laforge, developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform at Google
When asked about his thoughts on having been selected to serve on the Micronaut Foundation Technical Advisory Board and what he plans to achieve in this role, Venkat Subramaniam told InfoQ:
Both time-to-market and the ability to respond to change are highly critical. The demands are different today than only a few years ago. We need quick start up time, scale, performance, resilience, and more, for our microservices and serverless applications.
Micronaut caught my attention from the early on. It's one of the few frameworks that enables both developer productivity and runtime performance. I was quick to dive in and the framework has continued to amaze me in many ways. It was a pleasant surprise, and I am very humbled to have been recently invited to serve on the Technical Advisory Board.
Jeff Scott Brown, co-founder and director of the Micronaut Foundation, Grails and Micronaut practice lead at OCI, spoke to InfoQ about the formation of the foundation.
InfoQ: What was the inspiration to create the Micronaut Foundation?
Brown: The formation of Micronaut Foundation brings together a diverse range of interests from our growing Micronaut community and, as adoption continues to accelerate, the additional governance (and opportunity) offered by the foundation ensures all interested parties have a voice, while maintaining continuity and growth of the core framework for our community.
InfoQ: What are the initial short-term goals of the Micronaut Foundation?
Brown: The Micronaut Foundation serves to:
- Ensure technical innovation and advancement of Micronaut as a free and open public use software development framework for a growing global community.
- Evangelize and promote the Micronaut framework as a leading technology in the JVM space.
- Build and support an ecosystem of complementary documentation, functionality, and services.
The Micronaut Foundation is supported by a Technical Advisory Board which is in place and adding a lot of value to the Micronaut roadmap and ongoing development and prospects.
InfoQ: How were the members of the Technical Advisory Board chosen, especially those outside of OCI?
Brown: Micronaut's Technical Advisory Board members include technology thought leaders across our industry, who have diverse experience and expertise in cloud computing, distributed computing, microservices and serverless, and other related and emerging areas. That diversity is important and will continue as new members are added.
InfoQ: How may the Java community participate in achieving the goals of the Micronaut Foundation?
Brown: There are a lot of ways that members of the Micronaut community can participate in the growing success of the technology. Of course, we will continue to encourage and accept pull requests from the community. That has always been a core part of our technology's success and evolution.
It is amazing to see how many thought leaders and passionate technologists have invested in promoting the technology at their places of work, at conferences and meetups, in blog posts and any forum where they have the opportunity to share their passion and enthusiasm for Micronaut. Any and all ideas for how we should improve the technology are always welcome. We have an active set of community channels in Gitter, which is used for sharing ideas as well as asking and answering questions to help support the community.
We also invite our community to join us in continuing to invest in and grow the framework through financial contributions. We encourage our corporate community, who are in a position to support the free and open-source technologies (like Micronaut) that continue to help drive (all of) our business, to harness the value that participating more collaboratively can unlock.
For more information on financial contributions to Micronaut Foundation, please email foundation@micronaut.io.
Formerly a principal software engineer and Grails and Micronaut product lead at OCI, Graeme Rocher recently moved to Oracle Labs to "help drive adoption and advancement of Micronaut within Oracle." Rocher remains a co-founder and director of the Micronaut Foundation.
Resources
- State of the Micronaut by Jeff Scott Brown (July 2, 2020)
- Micronaut Foundation Announced by Micronaut (June 29, 2020)
- Object Computing Announces Establishment of New Micronaut Foundation by OCI (June 29, 2020)
Editor's Note
This news story was updated to include Guillaume Laforge, a recent addition to the technical advisory board.
