Roll back to JDK 21 for now, and make Java version configurable in the root build.gradle
The project has run into no less than three distinct show-stopping bugs in JDK22, across multiple vendors, and gradle still doesn't fully support it, meaning you need multiple JDK versions installed.
To avoid having to either hard-code or manually configure service addresses (possibly several dozen), and to reduce the project's dependency on docker to deal with routing and discovery, the option to use [Zookeeper](https://zookeeper.apache.org/) to manage services and discovery has been added.
A service registry interface was added, with a Zookeeper implementation and a basic implementation that only works on docker and hard-codes everything.
The last remaining REST service, the assistant-service, has been migrated to gRPC.
This also proved a good time to clear out primordial technical debt from the root of the codebase. The 'service-client' library has been taken behind the barn and given a last farewell. It's replaced by a small library for managing gRPC channels.
Since it's no longer used by anything, RxJava has been removed as a dependency from the project.
Although the current state seems reasonably stable, this is a work-in-progress commit.
This is not hooked into anything yet. The change also makes modifications to the parquet-floor library to support reading and writing of byte[] arrays. This is desirable since we may in the future want to support inputs that are not text-based, and codifying the assumption that each document is a string will definitely cause us grief down the line.
... also move some common configuration into the root build.gradle-file.
Support for JDK21 in lombok is a bit sketchy at the moment, but it seems to work. This upgrade is kind of important as the new index construction really benefits from Arena based lifecycle control over off-heap memory.
