Updating Microservices with Netty 5, Kafka 3, and React: Whirlpool Revisited

John Boardman Development Technologies, Java, JavaScript, Microservices, React Leave a Comment

Back in 2015 and 2016, I wrote two blogs that went step by step to develop a microservice/Netty architecture with fully working code called Whirlpool.

A lot has changed in the years since, so recently I decided to come back to the project, update it with the latest versions of Kafka and Netty, and add a React UI to it (rather than the vanilla JavaScript version it used before). In addition, I also added Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) scripts in addition to the Mac and Linux scripts that were there before and made all of the scripts more robust.

This blog will be about the work that went into all of those updates, plus a look at the new React UI. This provides an excellent view into what it takes to update an outdated microservices application implemented with Kafka (version .9 –>3.0) and Netty (4.1.3->5.0.0-alpha2), bringing all versions up to date and adding a React UI. By the end you’ll be familiar with the latest versions of these frameworks, know some “gotchas” to avoid, as well as understand how to integrate WebSockets into React.

Real-Time Communication: Implementing Websockets With Spring Boot

Thomas Kendall Development Technologies, Java, JavaScript, Spring Boot 3 Comments

When developing web applications, we sometimes need to push server events down to connected clients. However, HTTP was not designed to allow this. To get around this limitation, a polling pattern was established where web pages would intermittently poll the server for any new events. This pattern was not ideal as it added HTTP overhead, was only as fast as the polling rate, and caused unnecessary load on the server.

Luckily, with the emergence of HTML5 came the WebSocket. The WebSocket protocol enables interaction between a browser and a web server with lower overheads. In this blog we’ll introduce the Websockets API and show how to implement Websockets with Spring Boot.