What are some alternatives to Finagle?

What is Finagle and what are its top alternatives?

Finagle is a distributed systems programming framework that is used by companies like Twitter to build high-performance servers and clients. It provides asynchronous, composable, and protocol-agnostic RPC, as well as simple concurrency and connection management. However, one limitation of Finagle is that it has a learning curve due to its sophisticated design.

Akka: Akka is a powerful toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient applications on the JVM. Key features include actor-based concurrency, fault tolerance, location transparency, and scalability. Pros include robust fault-handling mechanisms, while cons may include a steeper learning curve for beginners.
gRPC: gRPC is a high-performance, open-source RPC framework developed by Google. It supports multiple programming languages and platforms, uses Protocol Buffers for serialization, and provides features like bi-directional streaming and authentication. Pros include efficient network communication, while cons may include limited language support compared to Finagle.
Netty: Netty is a versatile networking framework that provides an asynchronous event-driven network application framework for rapid development of high-performance protocol servers and clients. Key features include a flexible and extensible API, efficient memory management, and support for various protocols. Pros include high-performance networking capabilities, while cons may include a more manual approach to building network applications.
Vert.x: Vert.x is a toolkit for building reactive applications on the JVM that offers event-driven and non-blocking programming models. It supports polyglot development, reactive streams, and distributed event bus communication. Pros include seamless integration with various technologies, while cons may involve a complex setup process.
RSocket: RSocket is a binary protocol for use on byte stream transports. It provides Reactive Streams semantics, multiplexed bidirectional communication, and resumption on connection. Pros include efficient use of resources, while cons may include less widespread adoption compared to Finagle.
Spring Cloud: Spring Cloud provides tools for building distributed systems on the JVM. It offers features like service discovery, circuit breakers, and distributed tracing. Pros include seamless integration with Spring ecosystem, while cons may include a heavier dependency footprint compared to Finagle.
Quasar: Quasar is a library that enables lightweight threads for the JVM that are capable of pausing and resuming. It supports reactive programming, async computations, and fine-grained concurrency control. Pros include efficient use of resources, while cons may involve potential compatibility issues with existing codebases.
RabbitMQ: RabbitMQ is a widely-used message broker that supports multiple messaging protocols. It provides features like message queuing, routing, and clustering. Pros include robust messaging capabilities, while cons may include potential performance bottlenecks in high-throughput scenarios.
Scribe: Scribe is a scalable and simple O(log(n)) API for aggregating streaming data for logging and monitoring purposes. It offers efficient log aggregation, dynamic configuration, and seamless integration with various data processing pipelines. Pros include simplicity and scalability, while cons may involve limited community support.
Apache Thrift: Apache Thrift is a scalable, extensible, multi-language remote procedure call (RPC) framework. It supports efficient cross-language development and includes features like serialization, code generation, and transport plugins. Pros include broad language support, while cons may include potential complexity in managing a large codebase.

Top Alternatives to Finagle

Finatra
At Twitter, Finagle provides the building blocks for most of the code written on the JVM. It has long-served as Twitter's extensible, protocol-agnostic, highly-scalable RPC framework. ...
gRPC
gRPC is a modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment. It can efficiently connect services in and across data centers with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking... ...
Akka
Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM. ...
Spring Boot
Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration. ...
Play
Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications. ...
Akka HTTP
The Akka HTTP modules implement a full server- and client-side HTTP stack on top of akka-actor and akka-stream. It’s not a web-framework but rather a more general toolkit for providing and consuming HTTP-based services. While interaction with a browser is of course also in scope it is not the primary focus of Akka HTTP. ...
RxJS
RxJS is a library for reactive programming using Observables, to make it easier to compose asynchronous or callback-based code. This project is a rewrite of Reactive-Extensions/RxJS with better performance, better modularity, better debuggable call stacks, while staying mostly backwards compatible, with some breaking changes that reduce the API surface. ...
Netty
Netty is a NIO client server framework which enables quick and easy development of network applications such as protocol servers and clients. It greatly simplifies and streamlines network programming such as TCP and UDP socket server. ...