A High Throughput, Low Latency and Small Memory Footprint API Platform

Blistering Speed and Small Memory Footprint

Save 10x to 100x on production provision costs

You need hundreds of instances of Spring Boot with Tomcat embedded to match one instance of light-4j in "Hello World" for the same throughput and latency.

Embedded Gateway to Address all Cross-cutting Concerns

Maximize developers productivity by focusing on business logic only

Plugin architecture that allows middleware handlers to be injected into the request/response chain to handler security, metrics, audit etc.

Design and Test Driven Development

OpenAPI specification, Unit, Integration, End-to-End and Client Tests

Generate code from specification and encourage unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end test as well as client tests to ensure quality and interoperability.

Built-in DevOps Tool Chain for CI/CD

Light-bot pipeline, Ansible playbook, Docker and Kubernetes

The entire tool chain (pipeline) and infrastructure (logging, metrics, messaging, security etc.) are integrated together for microservices and services are dockerized and orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Multi-Style Support for Different Products

Both synchronous request/response and asynchronous event driven frameworks

Supports Restful(light-rest-4j), Graphql(light-graphql-4j), Hybrid(light-hybrid-4j), and Eventuate Consistency(light-eventuate-4j), as well as Saga(light-saga-4j) for transaction orchestration between services.

OAuth2, Portal and Services to Form an Ecosystem

Provide a platform for on-premise solutions as well as hosted solutions

light-oauth2 is for security while light-portal is for service runtime monitoring and management and the API marketplace. Kafka is for messaging, ELK is for logging, InfluxDB and Grafana are for metrics, and ArangoDB is for DB.

Cross-Cutting Concerns

Light-4j and related frameworks provide dozens of middleware handlers that can be injected into the request/response chain to give your service an embedded gateway.

Check out light-4j middleware handlers.

Interaction Styles

Restful is for public APIs, Graphql is for mobile and Single Page Applications, while Hybrid for serverless. It takes advantage of both Monolithic and Microservices architecture. Eventuate is for event-driven applications.

Use the right framework for the right product.

Infrastructure Services

The OAuth2 provider is responsible for centralizing policy management and services which are responsible for policy enforcement. Portal is for API management and the marketplace. Others are third party services.

OAuth2, Portal and other infrastructure services.

Tool Chains

Light-codegen is used for scaffolding projects from OpenAPI spec, GraphQL IDL or Hybrid Schema. Light-bot Pipeline is for building, packaging, releasing and dockerizing. Kubernetes is for service orchestration.

Tool chain for code generation, devops and CI/CD.

We welcome all contributions

Light-4j is open-source and completely free.

Our contributors make Light brighter.

One of the world’s fastest API platforms