Credit: Christoph
Positioned as a replacement for multiple Java technologies, the ActiveJ platform is being put forward as a minimalistic, boilerplate-free, and fast technology stack for web, cloud, microservices, and high-load applications.
Consisting of loosely coupled components for asynchronous processing, I/O processing, high-performance web serving, and high-performance networking, ActiveJ, from the company of the same name, was built to replace Spring, Spark, Red Hat Quarkus, Micronaut, Vert.x, and other Java frameworks.
The approach of the ActiveJ platform is to give priority to business logic instead of framework specifications. Open source ActiveJ was created as a high-load ecosystem for the AdKernel real-time ad bidding and ad serving platform, after developers found existing Java platforms and frameworks lacking. ActiveJ 3.0, available since November and accessible on Maven, has been used in in-house projects at AdKernel, processing billions of daily requests.
ActiveJ has few third-party dependencies, the company says, and consists of a set of components that also can be used independently.
These components include ActiveInject, a library for lightweight dependency injection and ActiveSerializer which provides space-efficient serialisers developed with bytecode engineering. A schema-less approach is used to enhance performance.
Other components include ActiveCodeGen, a dynamic class and bytecode generator atop the ObjectWeb ASM library. The complexity of direct bytecode manipulation is abstracted and custom classes can be created on the fly.
This is in addition to ActiveRPC - a high-performance binary protocol for building distributed applications that require efficient client-server connections between servers - and ActiveFS - a lightweight asynchronous library for scalable, remote file storage, supporting data redundancy, resharding, and rebalancing - plus ActiveSpecializer which optimises code for the JVM code for speed.
