Flowable (V6) VS Quarkus

I’m doing a lot of exploratory work with BPMN right now.

I think if your business is largely transactional (think Stripe), there is a lot of value to be had by framing your development as “business process automation”.

The term (and BPMN) has a lot of enterprise baggage, but some of the tools out there [0][1] are well suited to orchestrating services (and people where necessary) as a single automated process. The the ability to build that flow visually using BPMN, and then execute it in a workflow engine where you can monitor it, audit it, and optimize over time is pretty compelling.

Here’s an interesting read on the topic: https://www.infoq.com/articles/events-workflow-automation/

[0] https://github.com/camunda-cloud/zeebe

[1] https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine

https://micronaut.io/ https://quarkus.io/

🥇 Spring Boot 🥈 Quarkus 🥉 Micronaut 🏅 Ktor 🏅 Http4k

If you want a fraction of the memory consumption in Java and don't need a JVM, you can leverage Graal Native Image for AOT compilation. Docs at: https://www.graalvm.org/22.0/reference-manual/native-image/. There are fancy micro-service frameworks like Quarkus: https://quarkus.io/.

Not sure when you played with the JVM last, but it's now way past its gas guzzling days. I mean, you could still create a Java power-hog if you wanted to, but when it comes to microservices, most people go native these days: https://quarkus.io/ (it still surprises me that many people don't know that Java native has been a viable option for a few years now). The last Java project I worked on, compiles to a native binary in under 2 mins and runs at a performance level, comparable to that of a Go or a Rust app (given the network latency)

I’m OP’s defense, I have to say that most people in this community have a very distorted view of what a modern Java app looks like. Much of the perception dates back from before the Java 8 era. Anyone who’s remotely had anything to do with the language in recent years, would know that the ecosystem has made serious steps to modernize. While you still see these old and bulky apps around, there is absolutely no reason to repeat past mistakes, and https://quarkus.io/ is a testament to that.

You can use Graal Native Image https://www.graalvm.org/22.0/reference-manual/native-image/ to produce a single native executable. Example of a Micro-service framework that has first class support for this is Quarkus (https://quarkus.io/). See https://quarkus.io/guides/building-native-image

As the result we add build time DI for our application. For that we created maven plugin in which we useBeanProcessor for processing bean definitions. Then in runtime we initialize container using Arc.initialize(). You can use it like this or use Quarkus to get more performance optimizations and features without extra actions like creating plugins.

There are many lean, popular, non-magical libraries in Java land. (https://quarkus.io/, https://vertx.io/, etc). Spring is a monster 😱. Its like comparing Kubernetes (written in Go) with some lean framework in another lang.