Quarkus vs Spring Boot – What’s the Difference Between Popular Techs?

Among many advanced programming languages and frameworks, developers have to choose the one to create a cutting-edge product. Choosing one framework over another may be tricky. For instance, Quarkus and Spring Boot are often compared and contrasted, given their popularity and many features. Thus, we’re going to shed some light on these two frameworks.

What is Quarkus?

Designed by developers for developers, Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java framework that expanded the language’s potential, making it fast and developer-friendly. It’s ambitiously referred to as “supersonic subatomic Java” because the framework specifically aims to optimize and make it an effective platform for cloud, serverless, and containerized environments.

With only a few milliseconds of startup time and a lower memory footprint, Quarkus is perfect for working with microservices. Since the framework is also adapted to GraalVM (a universal and polyglot virtual machine), it’s possible to perform the ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, converting the bytecode into native machine code. The code becomes binary, meaning it can be executed natively. The result is excellent execution time due to reduced workload.

Quarkus provides dependency injection based on CDI (Context and Dependency Injection). As a standard dependency injection framework, CDI lets us manage stateful components through injecting them and domain-specific lifecycle context in a type-safe manner. It helps infuse dependencies in client classes. It helps extend functionality and boot time, configure, and integrate a framework into an app.

Quarkus Pros:

• Heavily Documented

Lots of simple documentation for Quarkus is available on the web due to the support of several communities.

• Faster Booting Time

With the build-time metadata processing mechanism and standalone images built with Graal and Substrate VM, Quarkus ensures much faster boot time cutting down the overall app-building cost.

• Faster Hot Reloads

Quarkus automatically spot changes made to Java and recompile and deploy the changes allowing faster hot reloads.

• Build on JAX-RS

JAX-RS is a top Java specification request designed to make it easy to build an app that uses REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture.

• Excellent Up-To-Date Roadmaps

Providing excellent and interesting roadmaps, Quarkus helps developers to improve their projects with every new release.

Quarkus Cons:

• Complicated Installation of GraalVM

Though Quarkus is adapted to GraalVM, its installation process is not beginner-friendly. It requires verification of the OS-specific binaries and packages.

• Lack of Solution on Forums

There are not enough solutions to some of the problems one can face while using Quarkus on the community forums. It’s because Quarks is a relatively new framework, and it’s getting wider appreciation.

What is Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is a Java-based framework that tries to simplify Java web apps’ building, configuring, and running. It’s a commonly chosen framework for creating enterprise applications and microservices. With the help of other Spring projects and lots of production-ready integrations, the framework helps boost developers’ productivity.

Spring Boot reduces time-to-market for many Java applications since it automatically registers configurations based on the dependencies in the run time, thus cutting down the number of configurations and boilerplates. Focusing on convention over configuration, Spring Boot is highly used for creating standalone, production-grade apps.

Whenever you want to build up your app with Spring Boot, you may be sure it’ll be simpler than you expect. For example, even if the MySQL database is in your classpath and didn’t configure any database connection, Spring Boot will do it automatically.

Spring Boot Pros:

• Fast and Easy Development

With Spring Boot, even new users can easily create a production-grade app with minimum fuss and within a shorter time.

• Outstanding Community Supports

You can virtually find any solution provided by the extended Spring Boot community.

• Excellent Documentation

Spring Boot has extensive documentation, which can help solve most issues that occurred during development.

• No XML Configuration

Spring Boot doesn’t use XML configuration but automatically initializes, configures, and wires the beans, thus making properties simple.

• Reduced Overall Cost

With such features as auto-configuration, starters, and YAML support, Spring Boot deals effectively with boilerplate and cuts down the overall development cost.

• Template Design Pattern

Providing a template design partner, Spring Boot lets software engineers include their dependencies in the pom.xml file, where the data for programming projects is preserved.

Cons of Spring Boot:

• Higher Startup Times

Compared to Quarkus, Spring Boot requires more time for booting and the OS loading all the services.

• Require More Memory

Spring Boot projects need more memory. The bare minimum is about 72M total memory on the simplest application.

• Highly Dependent on Starter Modules

Dependency on starter modules and lots of other dependencies negatively affect application performance.

Comparing Quarkus and Spring Boot in Action

Quarkus and Spring Boot for Business Development

Both frameworks are well-equipped to offer significant benefits for businesses and allow building feature-rich applications. Let’s focus on what apps and projects can be built using the frameworks.

Quarkus for Business

Quarkus uses only about 12% of memory, resulting in a memory reduction of approximately 500 GB, and its startup time is an average of two seconds. It’s a valid reason why enterprises choose Quarkus for creating their applications.

Quarkus can boost developers’ productivity and help them build innovative applications with Java’s modern architecture. By choosing these frameworks, you are getting an effective solution to run serverless, microservices, and cloud environments.

Businesses pick Quarkus due to increasing load, decreased start-up time, and in general, improved application performance. Besides, multiple types of tasks can be done with the help of the framework, including developing and testing. Thus, it cuts down the pricing and time spent on building an app.

Spring Boot for Business

Spring Boot is a tech of choice for many businesses. The main reasons why people prefer this technology include open-source, feature-rich, and free to use. Based on Java, Spring Boot inherits all its pros.

With the help of this mature tech, you can build multiple different types of apps and projects, such as web applications, REST services, employee management systems, and so on. So, wherever you need to build an app for your business, confidently pick this reliable framework.

Wrapping Up

So, who wins in the Quarkus vs. Spring Boot battle? Both frameworks are extensive techs for developing Java apps.

Quarkus is a new and more innovative framework than Spring Boot. It has lots of pros, but less community support is yet to reach its full potential. Speaking of Spring Boot, it’s a mature framework with a potent development module. It’s stable and reliable, and it provides heavy documentation and community support. However, it takes more time to build an app than Quarkus.

Anyway, it’s up to you which technology to choose. Whatever your choice will be, LITSLINK, a top software development company, is here for you to create revolutionary Quarkus and Spring Boot solutions with excellent performance!