The Duke's Choice Award is dedicated to all members of the Java ecosystem! In keeping with its 17-year history, the 2019 Duke's Choice Award winners will be announced at Code One, the world's biggest Java technology conference and gathering of Java community members.

In this issue, we continue the theme by examining how to build apps with containers in mind and how to deploy containers. For straight Java apps, the jlink and jdeps tools are excellent solutions for creating modularized, small, self-contained apps.

In this issue, we examine three leading frameworks for microservices: Javalin, which is a very lightweight, unopinionated Kotlin-based web framework; Micronaut, which handles all feature injection at compile time and so loads extremely fast; and Helidon, which is a cloud native framework that generates a pure Java SE JAR ile that can be run as a service or a complete app.