Difference between SpringBoot and Light-4j

The major difference is Spring Boot is based on servlet container and it is blocking and light-4j is based on non-blocking Undertow core. That is why there is huge gap in performance.

As this benchmark shows one light-4j instance can complete with over 100’s Spring Boot instances for the same throughput and latency not even counting SpringBoot uses 5 times more memory per instance. If you have too many services, then production cost will be significantly different.

Another big difference is developer productivity increase as light-4j generates the code from specification, IDL or schema and allows developers only working on the business handlers and business handler test cases without even knowing that all other cross-cutting concerns. For Spring, developers have to take care of configurations and wire in different components either with code or annotations.

Spring framework was designed to compete with Java EE and it has to provide all the features of Java EE and it is as heavy as Java EE. It is not possible to build light-weight cloud native application without eating too much resources.