1 What is Quarkus?

With a vast ecosystem of libraries, frameworks, standards, runtimes, and experienced developers, Java is a great choice for building modern, robust, and scalable software. In today’s data-oriented, cloud-first, cost-sensitive world, Java is also sometimes viewed as mature, slow, and resource-intensive. Quarkus changes this perception, offering a fast, lightweight, and flexible Java framework perfect for modern enterprise applications.

Quarkus combines popular libraries, Java standards, and best practices with an innovative approach to building and running applications, delivering both great user experience and developer productivity. Its build processing-oriented architecture results in smaller and faster runnable artifacts, perfect for contemporary designs like microservices and serverless as well as more traditional monolithic applications. It’s also great for specialized use cases like CLI apps, edge, GitHub actions, and Kubernetes operators.

In this book, we’ll show you how to build Java applications using Quarkus from the ground up, gradually working towards an enterprise system consisting of multiple Quarkus microservices. Along the way, we will explain the main concepts, tools, and features of Quarkus to help you understand where and how Quarkus can be a good fit for your next projects.

1.1 Why Quarkus?

1.2 Introducing Quarkus

1.2.1 A Kubernetes native stack

1.2.2 OpenJDK HotSpot and GraalVM

1.2.3 Libraries and standards

1.3 Principles of Quarkus

1.3.1 Imperative and reactive programming seamlessly connected together

1.3.2 Making developers' lives easier

1.4 The Quarkus architecture

1.5 Building the Acme Car Rental application using Quarkus

1.5.1 Use cases

1.5.2 Architecture

1.5.3 Implementation

1.6 Alternative frameworks

1.6.1 Spring Boot

1.6.2 Micronaut

1.6.3 Helidon

1.6.4 Framework summary

1.7 Next steps

1.8 Summary