Open Source with Support

Helidon is open-source software, licensed with Apache License, Version 2.0. Its codebase is kept in GitHub. Its artifacts are published to Maven Central. This makes it easy for users to inspect, modify, and contribute to its source code. The Apache license makes it easy for organizations to adopt Helidon from a licensing perspective. Publishing artifacts to Maven Central makes it easy and natural for developers and operators to pull Helidon binaries into development environments and CI/CD pipelines. In short, Helidon is intentionally aligned with modern mainstream development practices to make it as easy as possible to adopt and use.

And yet, enterprise-grade support is also available for Helidon. Oracle offers cost-competitive commercial support for Helidon, for customers serious about support SLAs for their production operations. So, customers can get the best of both worlds: seamless incorporation of Helidon into DevOps practices and third- party product approvals, and award-winning customer support for high-scale mission-critical production applications.

Two API Flavors for Two Programming Styles

Helidon offers two API flavors: Helidon SE, and Helidon MP. Both are fun to program in, but each caters to a different style of programming

Feature Richness

Both API flavors, Helidon SE and Helidon MP, offer a rich and similar set of features, like configuration and metrics and security, as examples. In Helidon MP, the APIs for the features are specified by a standards body, whereas in Helidon SE they are not. In both cases, the set of features available is complete enough to cover every aspect of the needs of modern microservices applications.

Enterprise Features

Helidon intentionally includes many features required by industrial-strength enterprise applications – even when they are now architected with microservices. Among these features are support for data access, messaging, and transactions, with integrations to existing Oracle products in each category.

Integrations

Helidon integrates with many other technologies that are useful in the implementation of microservices applications, for example:

  • Oracle Coherence and Coherence Community Edition, the leading in- memory data grid, which can serve as a distributed cache or system of record for stateful microservices

  • The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) SDK for Java, for using a wide variety of OCI services from within Helidon applications

  • Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS), including

    • Bi-directional REST service invocations

    • Helidon-to-WLS SOAP web service invocations

    • Helidon consumption and production of messages on WLS- hosted JMS destinations

    • Single sign-on between Helidon and WLS -hosted services using Oracle Identity Cloud Service

    • Distributed transaction coordination between Helidon and WLS

    • hosted resources using Oracle MicroTx Free

  • Messaging Connectors for JMS, Kafka, and Oracle AQ, to allow Helidon applications to consume and produce messages with those providers

  • HashiCorp Vault for accessing securely stored tokens, passwords, API keys, PKI certificates, and other secrets

  • Micrometer Metrics, for monitoring Helidon applications using Micrometer

  • Neo4j, for using a graph database from within Helidon applications