Helidon 2.3.4 has been released. It is mostly a bugfix release, but one of the fixes - “fix issue when Netty server hangs when under load” - seems pretty important.

Helidon looks like a competitor to Quarkus, Micronaut, Spring Boot, and DropWizard, among other candidates. It provides two models, a “standard edition” and a “microprofile edition”, which provide different programming models: SE is “reactive and functional”, while “MP” is declarative and provides dependency injection features more in line with the traditional Jakarta EE model.

Helidon projects also benefit from the use of the Helidon Maven plugin, whose documentation is… not easy to find. However, it’s leveraged by the Helidon sample projects, which means that if you have GraalVM installed, you can pretty easily generate a pure-native image from a Helidon SE project. (The sample project generated a native image that was 38MB on an OSX machine running Big Sur; your mileage on other platforms may differ somewhat, but that’s still not bad for a native image that does as much as Helidon does.)