Out with the old

I have spent the last year and a half working daily with Quarkus – and I have to say, it has seemingly thought of everything a person would want or need. Native builds are a bit of a hassle some times, but in my experience Quarkus makes it easy.

After over a decade of working with Tapestry 5 in monolithic applications, I had the opportunity to switch things up. I started building microservices with Quarkus. While Tapestry isn’t a bad framework, by any means, the change has made me realize how slow and painful developing with it (and other legacy frameworks) really can be.

Quarkus’ blazing fast start-up times have been life-changing, and GraalVM makes it even faster. No longer are the days of waiting minutes for applications to start up. Additionally, the many plugins and built in functionality, such as their REST implementation “written from the ground up” makes creating, testing, and maintaining REST services a breeze. Throw in the testing library REST-assured to have everything you need to get started.

With LTS versions every 6 months and a growing community (backed by RedHat). These both make it so improvements and bug fixes get released much quicker than most frameworks I’ve encountered. Though, staying up-to-date with the latest version hasn’t been without it’s problems, I have found the process of upgrading (even between major versions – eg. 2.x to 3.x) relatively straightforward. This is largely due to clear documentation and a CLI tool that helps do the heavy lifting.

I look forward to continue working with Quarkus. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a fast, modern and well-maintained Java framework. Regardless of your next project size, Quarkus should be a contender. It’s at the top of my list.

TL;DR

If you are looking for a new Java framework, give Quarkus a try.