foreword

It is an honor to introduce you to Quarkus in Action, a book I have searched for since I began my personal Quarkus journey. Even if Java wasn’t my first programming language, it is the one that has stuck with me the longest—from the early days, when server-side Java began to power the largest enterprise applications, all the way to today’s distributed, service-oriented architectures. What continues to surprise me is not only the power of the language itself but also the solid ecosystem of tools and frameworks that makes developers’ lives easier and working with Java even more enjoyable. With the advent of smaller runtimes like WildFly and adaptable packaging for container-based JVM applications, developers need to handle a lot more moving parts and configuration elements. The inherent complexity overwhelmed me quickly, and there is little that made me forget about it as much as Quarkus does. With its very effective convention over configuration approach that not only uses sensible defaults but also allows for the necessary flexibility in various environments to high-performance native executables, extended by an ever-growing universe of available extensions, it is the Swiss army knife a Java developer always dreamt of. This makes it a true developer companion that boosts everyone’s productivity.