Spring is the most popular framework for building Java backends, but many companies are exploring alternatives like Vert.x, Armeria, and gRPC. What has been your experience?
Which frameworks or libraries have you seen companies adopt, and at what scale were these companies operating?
I’ve used Vert.x on a few projects, and it’s been a game-changer for reactive, high-performance backends.
It’s event-driven and non-blocking, making it ideal for handling a large number of concurrent requests without heavy threads.
Companies dealing with real-time data or IoT applications often pick Vert.x for its speed and scalability.
I personally used it for a medium-scale messaging system, and the performance was noticeably smoother than traditional Spring Boot endpoints for high concurrency workloads.
Hi! I’ve seen Armeria gaining traction in organizations focused on microservices.
It’s designed for building asynchronous HTTP/2, gRPC, and Thrift servers.
Big tech companies like LINE use it to power production-grade microservices at scale.
I experimented with it on a small internal service, and the seamless integration with gRPC made communication between services very clean and type-safe.
Another approach I’ve worked with is gRPC, especially for service-to-service communication in microservices architectures.
It uses Protocol Buffers and HTTP/2, which makes it much faster than JSON REST in some scenarios.
I’ve seen startups adopt it for low-latency systems like live chat or real-time analytics, and larger companies use it for internal APIs to reduce overhead between services.
Personally, it’s excellent when you need strict contracts and cross-language support between services.