I was over at /r/java scanning the posts when I ran into a question about Java microservices and what people are using. I saw two comments mentioning Dropwizard so… thought I’d take a look at it.
It’s similar to Spring Boot, but perhaps with a more heavy emphasis on simply banging out RESTful web services. Dropwizard uses Jetty under the covers to handle all of the socket stuff and whatever other kind of servlet functionality it might need.
Within the Reddit thread, there’s also quite a bit of talk about Docker and how people are using it. Dropwizard has introduced me to the idea of “fat jars” which I’d never heard of previously – which seem in a way to be a competitor to using Docker to package up your application. Basically, a fat jar is one giant jar which includes all of the class files from every dependency of your application. Here’s a web resource on the topic from 2012.