Chapter 1. Getting Started Dashboard
1.1. Alternatives for getting started with Fuse standalone
The following dashboard shows alternative paths for getting started with Fuse standalone, depending on which container type you prefer:
1.2. Overview of the Fuse containers
To help you choose the right container for your project, the following sections give a brief overview of each container type.
1.2.1. JBoss EAP
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), based on Jakarta EE (previously, Java EE) technology from the Eclipse Foundation, was originally created to address the use cases for developing enterprise applications. Characterized by well-defined patterns for implementing services and standardized Java APIs (for accessing services such as persistence, messaging, security, and so on), in recent years this technology has evolved to be more lightweight, with the introduction of CDI for dependency injection and simplified annotations for enterprise Java beans.
Distinctive features of this container technology are:
- Particularly suited to running in standalone mode.
- Many standard services (for example, persistence, messaging, security, and so on) pre-configured and provided out of the box.
- Application WARs typically small and lightweight (since many dependencies are pre-installed in the container).
- Standardized, backward-compatible Java APIs.
1.2.2. Apache Karaf
Apache Karaf is based on the OSGi standard from the OSGi Alliance. OSGi originated in the telecommunications industry, where it was used to develop gateway servers that could be upgraded on the fly, without needing to shut down the server (a feature known as hot code swapping). Subsequently, OSGi container technology has found a variety of other uses and is popular for modularised applications (for example, the Eclipse IDE).
Distinctive features of this container technology are:
- Particularly suited to running in standalone mode.
- Strong support for modularisation (OSGi bundles), with sophisticated class-loading support.
- Multiple versions of a dependency can be deployed side by side in a container (but this requires some care in practice).
- Hot code swapping, enabling you to upgrade or replace a module without shutting down the container. This is a unique feature, but requires significant effort to make it work properly.
1.2.3. Spring Boot
Spring Boot is a recent evolution of the well-known Spring container. A distinctive quality of the Spring Boot container is that container functionality is divided up into small chunks, which can be deployed independently. This enables you to deploy a container with a small footprint, specialized for a particular kind of service, and this happens to be exactly what you need to fit the paradigm of a microservices architecture.
Distinctive features of this container technology are:
- Particularly suited to running on a scalable cloud platform (Kubernetes and OpenShift).
- Small footprint (ideal for microservices architecture).
- Optimized for convention over configuration.
- No application server required. You can run a Spring Boot application Jar directly in a JVM.
