This is the era of polyglot! Proponents of this practice spread the word that you’ve to choose the language best adapted to the problem at hand. And with a single team dedicated to a microservice, this might make sense.
My pragmatic side tells me it means that developers get to choose the language they are developing with and don’t care how it will be maintained when they go away… On the other hand, my shiny-loving side just want to try - albeit in a more controlled environment, such as this blog!
Introduction
In this 3 parts serie, I’ll try to use polyglot on a project:
- The first part is about the build system
- The second part will be about the server side
- The final part will be about the client-side
My example will use a Vaadin project built with Maven and using a simple client-side extension. You can follow the project on Github.
Polyglot Maven
Though it may have been largely ignored, Maven can now talk many different languages since its version 3.3.1 thanks to an improved extension mechanism. In the end, the system is quite easy:
- Create a
.mvnfolder at the root of your project - Create a
extensions.xmlfile - Set the type of language you’d like to use:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<extensions>
<extension>
<groupId>io.takari.polyglot</groupId>
<artifactId>polyglot-yaml</artifactId>
<version>0.1.8</version>
</extension>
</extensions>Here, I set the build "language" as YAML.
In the end, the translation from XML to YAML is very straightforward:
modelVersion: 4.0.0
groupId: ch.frankel.blog.polyglot
artifactId: polyglot-example
packaging: war
version: 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT
dependencies:
- { groupId: com.vaadin, artifactId: vaadin-spring, version: 1.0.0.beta2 }
build:
plugins:
- artifactId: maven-compiler-plugin
version: 3.1
configuration:
source: 1.8
target: 1.8
- artifactId: maven-war-plugin
version: 2.2
configuration:
failOnMissingWebXml: falseThe only problem I had was in the YAML syntax itself:
just make sure to align the elements of the plugin to the plugin declaration (e.g. align version with artifactId).
Remember to check the POM on Github with each new part of the serie!