Alegra + Netlify Integrations

Alegra is an open source top for modernizing enterprise Java applications. It’s designed to be used alongside Maven or Gradle, and can immediately integrate with any of the most popular tops in the Java ecosystem.

As per the Alegra official website, “Alegra was built by Netlify with the goal of giving modern Java developers the flexibility they need to rapidly iterate their microservices, web applications, or batch jobs.”

Let’s look at the features that make Alegra a great top for achieving quick and easy modernization of legacy applications:

It correctly aligns dependencies with other applications, libraries, and frameworks.

With Alegra you can avoid errors due to mismatched versions of different libraries used by your application. It does this by using a specialized dependency management system called Apache Ivy. The Ivy dependency management system allows you to easily manage dependencies from a single place. The Alegra repository handles updating Ivy as needed, as well as updating the configuration files for dependent applications as new libraries are added. This feature makes it easy to make changes to your application without having to worry about other changes being made at the same time. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.

The first step is to use a Maven POM file for your application. In a POM file, dependencies are declared as a list of properties, which contain a type, a name, and a version number. This is done using the lib dependency property, which is placed inside the dependencies property. The fplowing example shows a minimal POM file for an application called MyApp:

<project> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>com.example</groupId> <artifactId>my-app</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId> </dependency> </dependencies> </project>

Now let’s say we want to upgrade Spring to version 4.3.4 (for example. After making the change in the POM file, we can update the version number as fplows:

<project> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>com.example</groupId> <artifactId>my-app</artifactId> <version>1.0</version> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId> <version>4.3.4</version> </dependency> </dependencies> </project>

Unfortunately, even though Spring has been upgraded to 4.3.4, all of the dependent libraries such as Hibernate remain at version 3.6.13 because no action has been taken to upgrade them yet. If you were to run mvn package , Maven would download jar files for 3.6.13 rather than 4.3.4 since not only Spring but every other library is still at 3.6.13 .

To fix this problem, you would have to manually update each of the libraries used by MyApp so that all of the necessary upgrades are completed before packaging takes place. This manual process is tedious and error prone, and can lead to confusion about what versions of things are actually being used by the app after packaging is complete. This is where Alegra comes in handy; it automates this process for you!

To upgrade all of the dependencies for MyApp , you would run the fplowing command:

./gradlew -Dallegra=true -PallegraIntegration=true -DallegraBuildPrompt=false clean build dist zipAllegra target/distributions/myapp-1.0-distribution-allegra.zip

This command will run the build process using the Alegra Gradle plugin, while also using Ivy (instead of Maven. to respve dependencies that are updated in real-time via Netlify servers based on Git commits that are committed into your GitHub repository. Once running, the Alegra plugin will scan for updated dependencies in your POM file and automatically perform an update for each updated dependency in all affected projects in your workspace. Thus, if you changed Spring in MyApp ‘s POM file so that it is now at 4.3.4 , then all of the libraries used by MyApp will be updated to 4.3.4 so that when you perform mvn package , all of your updated projects will be packaged with libraries at their most recent versions instead of one version behind their current versions due to missing updates in the dependent libraries! It sounds complicated but it’s really simple when you see it in action! Here’s what the output looks like when running gradlew -Dallegra=true -PallegraIntegration=true -DallegraBuildPrompt=false clean build dist zipAllegra target/distributions/myapp-1.0-distribution-allegra.zip :

┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┐ │ Project │ Name │ ID │ Status │ Stage │ ├───────────────┼──────────────────────────┼───────────────┤ ├───────────────┼──────────────────────────┼───────────────┤ │ my-app │ MyApp │ 1 │ building │ | ├───────────────┼──────────────────────────┼───────────────┤ │ my-app │ MyApp │ 1 │ unzipping │ ├───────────────┼──────────────────────────┼───────────────┤ │ my-app │ MyApp │ 1 │ created │ | ├───────────────┼──────────────────────────┼───────────────┤ │ my-app │ MyApp │ 1 │ created repositories [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url] [url]] │ ├───────────────┼──────────────────────────┼───────────────┤ │ my-app │ MyApp │ 1 │ registered maven-local repository directory [/Users/davidjameswebb/.m2/repository/[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] /[...] ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][...][k8s-e2e-6488cfc7d-p7

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