Quarkus Bullet Train Arrives with Third Maintenance Release

Red Hat's Quarkus team rang in the new year last week with the release of Quarkus 2.15.3.Final. This version contains bug fixes and documentation improvements for the 2.15 release train.

This is a veritable bullet train of releases of the Kubernetes-native Java framework. This maintenance release comes hot on the heels of the 2.15.2.Final release, announced just a few days earlier. Quarkus 2.15.1.Final was released on December 21, and 2.15.0.Final on December 14.

Guillaume Smet, principal software engineer at Red Hat, where he works on Quarkus and the Hibernate portfolio, called this "a recommended upgrade for anyone already using 2.15," in a blog post.

Quarkus is a popular, lightweight, high-performance framework designed to reduce the footprint and latency of Java applications, specifically for cloud-native architectures, such as microservices, containers, and serverless. It's an alternative to Spring Boot, and it’s tailored for the GraalVM and HotSpot JVMs, and combines support for the imperative programming model with support for cloud-native, event-driven, asynchronous, and reactive models in the same platform—all of which allows organizations to continue to leverage their Java know-how.

"Quarkus was created to enable Java developers to create applications for a modern, cloud-native world," the Quarkus website explains. "…The goal is to make Java the leading platform in Kubernetes and serverless environments while offering developers a framework to address a wider range of distributed application architectures."

Quarkus works out of the box with popular Java standards, frameworks, and libraries, including the Eclipse MicroProfile, Apache Kafka, RESTEasy (JAX-RS), Hibernate ORM (JPA), Spring, Infinispan, and Camel, among others. “Developers can choose the Java framework they want to use when Quarkus applications are running on the JVM,” the company said in a statement.

It also comes with MicroProfile OpenTracing for observing traffic patterns among services, and MicroProfile Metrics for exposing JVM, Quarkus runtime, and custom application metrics to monitoring systems, such as the Prometheus platform.

Quarkus’ dependency injection solution is based on CDI (contexts and dependency injection), and it includes an extension framework to expand functionality and to configure, boot, and integrate a framework into your application. A

And it might come with my favorite tag line for a piece of Java tech: "Supersonic Subatomic Java." (It promises to deliver small artifacts, extremely fast boot time, and lower time-to-first-request, so it's an apt tag.)

Despite its origins at Red Hat, Quarkus is an open-source project licensed under the Apache License version 2.0. First and foremost, the company insists often, it is supported by an open community "where contributions, ideas and discussions are done in the open and contributors are welcome."

Posted by John K. Waters on January 11, 2023