BMC Anvil’s Quarkus Stack

I went through an intro with some numbers and charts, then some reasons to pick a java ecosystem. Good performance was a reason… stability, maturity, libraries, etc. were others.

And one day java was not bloated…

I’ve been a spring / springboot dev at work and although a joy to work with, and being able to create services in no time, it can get slow starting-up, generate heavy footprint targets and can get a little in the way when fast prototyping.

during an experiment with new tech I tried Quarkus on small apps; the kind of applications one would do with python or js to run on aws lambdas, the one place where spring is quasi de-facto banned due to startup times, and memory footprint. (the previous remark thou, is subject to change shortly with native support)

I found Quarkus to have a fantastic set of tools no shy to spring and a few advantages too. When compiling an app in native mode, startup times and memo footprint are almost on par with js and golang. Quarkus made a java app to run like no other java app.

So Quarkus

so Quarkus then…

these are the features that made me implement the app using Quarkus instead of other frameworks or mixing matching libraries, sacrificing the highest benchmark performance:

• small footprint even on jvm mode
• native ready
• development tools
• almost instant live reload on change while developing
• seamless jboss / red-hat integration
• reactive stack
  • resteasy
  • hibernate react2
  • mutiny(flow API)
• huge libraries ecosystem support

easy to overlook features: dev tools

Quarkus dev tools are at another level.

• the live reload on BMC_Anvil takes, with all libraries and a full drop-create of the database, just 2 seconds on the clock… and we are talking around 10K lines of code and 50 tables with seeded data. Changing the smallest thing on an entity or method is completely painless.
• the dev UI allowing to change cache settings, reset DBs, change pools, check endpoints, browse scores, etc. all on they fly is near mind-blowing.

I have not seen yet something like this except on hazelcast’s settings and control panel.

the importance of these features is again… time to market, the easier the system works for you, the easier to get quality things done faster. It makes also onboarding and training new devs easier and faster.

the Quarkus version used by BMC_Anvil is 3.1.2.FINAL, but I usually update it as fast as they update.

easy to overlook features: support

maybe because it is under red-hat’s + JBOSS umbrella, integration with other tools from the group is seamless and time to fix bug reports is very fast, and you can actively see creators of core tools getting involved.