Red Hat Developer has published Quarkus for Spring Developers, a comprehensive, 149-page e-book introducing Quarkus to Java developers, with a focus on helping people familiar with Spring make the transition. This includes the Spring Framework and Spring Boot, and any other modules within the Spring ecosystem.

While Java continues to be one of the most widely used programming languages for building applications, Java developers often struggle to make their applications smaller and faster to meet modern computing requirements.

Quarkus is designed to help.

What is Quarkus?

Introduced by Red Hat, Quarkus is an open source project that is designed to work with popular Java standards, frameworks and libraries, including Spring.

It’s a full-stack Kubernetes-native Java framework made for Java virtual machines (JVMs) and native compilation, optimizing Java specifically for containers so it can be used in serverless, cloud and Kubernetes environments.

What’s in the e-book?

In this book you’ll learn:

  • How to optimize Java for modern compute and runtime demands.

  • The history of Quarkus and the challenges that led to its creation.

  • How Spring conventions are implemented in Quarkus through like-for-like examples, including testing.

  • How Quarkus can increase developer productivity cycles through live coding, developer services and continuous testing.

With a plethora of examples, comparisons and code samples, this book will help you get up to speed on developing containerized applications with Quarkus.

All source code from the book is available on GitHub, and the book includes the following chapters.

Chapter 1: Introducing Quarkus

The e-book opens with a brief history of and introduction to Java, Spring, microservices, and Quarkus. Sections include:

  • Brief history of Java

  • Introduction of Spring

  • Emergence of microservices

  • Challenges of microservices

  • Quarkus: the solution to today’s challenges

Chapter 2: Getting Started with Quarkus

This chapter showcases some of the tools in Quarkus, while also explaining the key differences between Quarkus and Spring capabilities, including:

  • Prerequisites

  • Extensions

  • Creating a new project

  • Project structure

  • Quarkus dev mode and live coding

  • Configuration

  • Dependency injection

  • Lifecycle callbacks

  • Native image

  • Testing

Chapter 3: RESTful Applications

Here, the book looks at web applications, specifically RESTful web applications, highlighting the similarities and differences between Quarkus and Spring. Sections include:

  • Underlying runtime

  • Reactive libraries

  • HTTP method

  • Routing HTTP requests

  • Building RESTful endpoints

  • Testing RESTful endpoints

  • Server-sent event endpoints

  • Testing server-sent event endpoints

  • OpenAPI documentation

Chapter 4: Persistence

Again highlighting the differences between Quarkus and Spring, this chapter digs into an application’s persistence layer, including:

  • Evolution of the Java persistence API

  • JPA abstractions

  • Reactive data access

Chapter 5: Event-Driven Services

Here, the book goes over the benefits of Quarkus for implementing event-driven services using publish-subscribe events, reactive streams with Kafka, and Knative events, including:

  • Event message handling

  • Reactive messaging and streams

  • Knative events binding

Chapter 6: Building Applications for the Cloud

The final chapter covers building applications for the cloud, including:

  • Prerequisites

  • Preparing your application for the cloud

  • Deployment

  • Routing

  • Health checks

  • Service binding

  • Remote coding and debugging

  • Configuration management

  • Monitoring

Download your copy today

The e-book is a no-cost download available to anyone with a Red Hat Developer account.

You can download it here: Quarkus for Spring Developers.

Learn more about Quarkus