Creating a Microservice With Quarkus, Kotlin, and Gradle

Preface

In the previous article, the brief explanations of creating microservices on the modern JVM frameworks and comparison of them were shown. Now it’s time to take a closer look at the most recently appeared framework: Quarkus. I’ll describe the process of creating a microservice using the mentioned technologies and in accordance with the requirements specified in the main article.

You may also like: Build a Java REST API With Quarkus

This microservice will be a part of the following microservice architecture:

As usual, the project’s source code is available on GitHub.

Prerequisites

• JDK 13.

• Consul.

Creating an Application From Scratch

To generate a new project you can use a web starter or Maven (for Maven or Gradle project generation). It is worth noting that the framework supports Java, Kotlin, and Scala languages.

Dependencies

In this project, Gradle Kotlin DSL as a build tool is used. A build script should contain:

Plugins

Listing 1. build.gradle.kts

plugins {

    kotlin("jvm")

    kotlin("plugin.allopen")

    id("io.quarkus")

}

Plugins' versions resolution is performed in settings.gradle.kts.

Dependencies

Also, it is needed to make some Kotlin classes open (they’re final by default; more details on Gradle configuration in the Quarkus Kotlin guide):

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allOpen {

    annotation("javax.enterprise.context.ApplicationScoped")

}

Configuration

The framework supports configuration via properties or YAML files (more detailed in the Quarkus config guide).

The configuration file is located in the resources folder and looks like:

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quarkus:

 http:

   host: localhost

   port: 8084

application-info:

 name: quarkus-service

 framework:

   name: Quarkus

   release-year: 2019

Here application’s standard properties are defined, as well as custom. Latter can be read as follows:

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import io.quarkus.arc.config.ConfigProperties

@ConfigProperties(prefix = "application-info")

class ApplicationInfoProperties {

    lateinit var name: String

    lateinit var framework: FrameworkConfiguration

    class FrameworkConfiguration {

        lateinit var name: String

        lateinit var releaseYear: String

    }

}

Beans

Before we start with the coding part, it should be noted that there is no main method in the source code of your Quarkus application, but maybe somewhen it will be.

Injection of @ConfigProperties bean from the previous listing to another bean is performed using @Inject annotation:

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@ApplicationScoped

class ApplicationInfoService(

    @Inject private val applicationInfoProperties: ApplicationInfoProperties,

    @Inject private val serviceClient: ServiceClient

) {

    ...

}

ApplicationInfoService bean annotated with @ApplicationScoped can then be injected itself like this:

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class ApplicationInfoResource(

    @Inject private val applicationInfoService: ApplicationInfoService

)

More on Contexts and Dependency Injection in the Quarkus CDI guide.

REST Endpoints

REST controller looks very typical for those who are familiar with Spring or Java EE:

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@Path("/application-info")

@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)

@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)

class ApplicationInfoResource(

    @Inject private val applicationInfoService: ApplicationInfoService

) {

    @GET

    fun get(@QueryParam("request-to") requestTo: String?): Response =

        Response.ok(applicationInfoService.get(requestTo)).build()

    @GET

    @Path("/logo")

    @Produces("image/png")

    fun logo(): Response = Response.ok(applicationInfoService.getLogo()).build()

}

REST Client

For working in a microservice architecture Quarkus service should be able to perform requests to other services. Since every service has the same API, it is worth to create a uniform interface for common code, and then a bunch of REST clients extending that interface:

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@ApplicationScoped

@Path("/")

interface ExternalServiceClient {

    @GET

    @Path("/application-info")

    @Produces("application/json")

    fun getApplicationInfo(): ApplicationInfo

}

@RegisterRestClient(baseUri = "http://helidon-service")

interface HelidonServiceClient : ExternalServiceClient

@RegisterRestClient(baseUri = "http://ktor-service")

interface KtorServiceClient : ExternalServiceClient

@RegisterRestClient(baseUri = "http://micronaut-service")

interface MicronautServiceClient : ExternalServiceClient

@RegisterRestClient(baseUri = "http://quarkus-service")

interface QuarkusServiceClient : ExternalServiceClient

@RegisterRestClient(baseUri = "http://spring-boot-service")

interface SpringBootServiceClient : ExternalServiceClient

As you can see, creating REST clients to the other services is as simple as creating an interface using the proper JAX-RS and MicroProfile annotations.

Service Discovery

As you saw in the previous section for the baseUri parameter services' names are used. But now there is no built-in support of Service Discovery (Eureka) or it doesn’t work properly (Consul) because the framework mainly targets cloud environments. I’ve implemented Service Discovery using Consul Client for Java library. Consul client includes two necessary functions, register and getServiceInstance (which uses the Round-robin algorithm):

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@ApplicationScoped

class ConsulClient(

    @ConfigProperty(name = "application-info.name")

    private val serviceName: String,

    @ConfigProperty(name = "quarkus.http.port")

    private val port: Int

) {

    private val consulUrl = "http://localhost:8500"

    private val consulClient by lazy {

        Consul.builder().withUrl(consulUrl).build()

    }

    private var serviceInstanceIndex: Int = 0

    fun register() {

        consulClient.agentClient().register(createConsulRegistration())

    }

    fun getServiceInstance(serviceName: String): Service {

        val serviceInstances = consulClient.healthClient().getHealthyServiceInstances(serviceName).response

        val selectedInstance = serviceInstances[serviceInstanceIndex]

        serviceInstanceIndex = (serviceInstanceIndex + 1) % serviceInstances.size

        return selectedInstance.service

    }

    private fun createConsulRegistration() = ImmutableRegistration.builder()

        .id("$serviceName-$port")

        .name(serviceName)

        .address("localhost")

        .port(port)

        .build()

}

At first, it is needed to register the application:

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@ApplicationScoped

class ConsulRegistrationBean(

    @Inject private val consulClient: ConsulClient

) {

    fun onStart(@Observes event: StartupEvent) {

        consulClient.register()

    }

}

Then it is needed to resolve services' names to its particular location. For that, a class that extends ClientRequestFilter and annotated with @Provider was created:

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@Provider

@ApplicationScoped

class ConsulFilter(

    @Inject private val consulClient: ConsulClient

) : ClientRequestFilter {

    override fun filter(requestContext: ClientRequestContext) {

        val serviceName = requestContext.uri.host

        val serviceInstance = consulClient.getServiceInstance(serviceName)

        val newUri: URI = URIBuilder(URI.create(requestContext.uri.toString()))

            .setHost(serviceInstance.address)

            .setPort(serviceInstance.port)

            .build()

        requestContext.uri = newUri

    }

}

The resolution is implemented simply by replacement URI of requestContext object with a service’s location obtained from the Consul client.

Testing

Tests for both API’s endpoints are implemented using REST Assured library:

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@QuarkusTest

class QuarkusServiceApplicationTest {

    @Test

    fun testGet() {

        given()

            .`when`().get("/application-info")

            .then()

            .statusCode(200)

            .contentType(ContentType.JSON)

            .body("name") { `is`("quarkus-service") }

            .body("framework.name") { `is`("Quarkus") }

            .body("framework.releaseYear") { `is`(2019) }

    }

    @Test

    fun testGetLogo() {

        given()

            .`when`().get("/application-info/logo")

            .then()

            .statusCode(200)

            .contentType("image/png")

            .body(`is`(notNullValue()))

    }

}

While testing, it is not necessary to register application in Consul, so I just put ConsulClientMock that extends actual ConsulClient next to the test class:

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@Mock

@ApplicationScoped

class ConsulClientMock : ConsulClient("", 0) {

    // do nothing

    override fun register() {

    }

}

Building

During build Gradle task quarkusBuild task is being called. By default, it generates runner JAR and lib directory with all the dependencies. To produce uber-JAR artifact quarkusBuild task needs to be configured as follows:

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tasks {

    withType<QuarkusBuild> {

        isUberJar = true

    }

}

To build project run ./gradlew clean build in the project’s root folder.

Launch

Before launching the microservice, you need to start Consul (described in the main article).

You can start microservices:

• Using quarkusDev Gradle task.

  Execute in the project’s root folder:

  ./gradlew :quarkus-service:quarkusDev

  Or call the task from IDE.

• Using the uber-JAR.

  Execute in the project’s root folder:

  java -jar quarkus-service/build/quarkus-service-1.0.0-runner.jar

Now you can use REST API, for example, perform the following request:

GET http://localhost:8084/application-info

It will return:

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{

  "name": "quarkus-service",

  "framework": {

    "name": "Quarkus",

    "releaseYear": 2019

  },

  "requestedService": null

}

Spring Compatibility

The framework provides compatibility layers for several Spring technologies: DI, Web, Security, Data JPA.

Conclusion

In this article, we saw how to implement a simple REST service on Quarkus using Kotlin and Gradle. If you look at the main article, you’ll see that created application has comparable parameters to the applications on the other new JVM frameworks. The framework has serious competitors such as Helidon MicroProfile, Micronaut, and Spring Boot (if we speak about full-stack frameworks). Therefore I think that we are waiting for an interesting development of events that will be useful for the whole Java ecosystem.

P.S. Thanks to VLSI for helping with this article.

Further Reading

Thoughts on Quarkus

Building a Java App With Gradle