Please welcome.. Helidon Níma!

Today we are announcing the first alpha version of Helidon Níma — the first microservices framework based on virtual threads. It is built from the ground up in tight collaboration with the Java team and combines an easy-to-use programming model with outstanding performance.

Helidon Níma will be a part of the next major Helidon release which is currently planned at the end of 2023. The technology preview is now available with the Helidon 4.0.0-ALPHA1 release. We will continue releasing previews as the development evolves.

The Helidon Níma web server intends to replace Netty in the Helidon ecosystem. It also can be used by other frameworks as an embedded web server component.

Níma currently supports:

• HTTP/1
• HTTP/2
• gRPC
• Observability Features (Metrics, Health Checks, Tracing)
• Fault Tolerance
• Testing integrations

Helidon Nima also uses new Java language features like sealed classes and enhanced switch expressions.

Better performance is also achieved with much simpler, cleaner, and more readable code.

Prior to Helidon Nima, developers would have a choice to use Helidon MP and write JAX-RS applications, or if they needed a higher level of performance and throughput they could use Helidon SE and write reactive based services. However, the reactive based services are more complex to write, maintain, and debug.

Development with Helidon Níma is much easier as it follows a simplified programming model with (almost) unlimited virtual threading resources available. The JVM takes care of the optimizations.

Helidon Níma is a fully open source framework, part of the Helidon codebase on GitHub: https://github.com/oracle/helidon/tree/main/Níma

Over the upcoming months additional Helidon 4.0.0 preview releases will be delivered that add support for MicroProfile, Helidon reactive API, and additional goodies!

Helidon Níma gives you the scalability of asynchronous programming models with the simplicity of synchronous code. See the technical article by Tomas Langer for more information and how to try it today.

Helidon Níma is still experimental. For production cases use Helidon 3.x.

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