[stickfigure]

I have been thinking of writing up a series of articles on this. Without going into too much detail:

* IDEA

* Deploy on Google App Engine, Digital Ocean App Platform, Heroku, Elastic Beanstalk, etc - get out of the ops business entirely.

* Guice as the backbone, no Spring/Boot. I wrote a tiny dropwizard-like "framework" to make this easier: https://github.com/gwizard/gwizard but there's a laughable amount of code here, you could build it all from scratch with minimal effort. This is about as lightweight as "frameworks" get because Guice does the heavy lifting.

* JAX-RS (Resteasy) for the web API. IMO this is the best part of Java web development. HTTP endpoints are simple synchronous Java methods (with a few annotations) and you can test them like simple Java methods.

* Lombok. Use @Value heavily. Cuts most of the boilerplate out of Java.

* Junit5 + AssertJ. (Or Google Truth, which is almost identical to AssertJ).

* Use functional patterns. Try to make all variables and fields final. Use collection streams heavily. Consider vavr.io (I'll admit I haven't used it in anger yet, but I would in a new codebase).

* StreamEx. Adds a ton of useful stream behavior; I don't even use basic streams anymore.

* Guava. There's just a lot of useful stuff here.

* For the database, it really depends on what you're building. Most generic business apps, postgres/hibernate/guice-persist/flyway. Yeah, folks complain about hibernate a lot but it's a decent way to map to objects. Use SQL/native queries, don't bother with JPQL, criteria queries, etc.

* Hattery for making http requests (https://github.com/stickfigure/hattery). This is another one of mine. I make zillions of http requests, functional/immutable ergonomics really matter to me.

* Github actions for CI.

* Maven for the build. Yes, it's terrible, except for every other build system is worse. Gradle seems like it should be better but isn't. I'd really love some innovation here. Sigh.

[smorgusofborg]

Cool, it is a lot to start researching but you sound like you use a very similar style to things I am used to in other languages.

On guice/gwizard/maven, if I understand correctly I would be defining new guice DI for something like a message broker (and gwizard's solutions for similar modules might serve as a template) while probably just using direct dependencies in maven for something that doesn't need to be mocked in unit tests or replaceable in production?

[stickfigure]

You could make a new guice module for the message broker, but you don't have to. If you want to use a message broker, just bind the service object as an eager singleton in your application module.

The main reason to make a separate guice module for the message broker is if setup requires a lot of boilerplate. You can put it all in a common jar artifact and include that in different services. But that's overkill if you just have one service, or if the broker has a fairly friendly interface to start with.

Guice is just a little bit of structure to bind together Normal Java Code. You don't need to wrap services or do things eg "the spring way". Just use the service; if you find yourself repeating code, consider abstracting it into a separate module.