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Java, Quarkus, Kafka, and more: The best of 2021

December 22, 2021
Containers Java Linux Kafka Kubernetes OpenShift
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Red Hat Developer Editorial Team
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Red Hat Developer always puts developers at the center of what we do, and we are proud of the content we published this year on application development and support topics. Keep reading for our most popular articles on Java, Quarkus, Apache Kafka, Camel K, and more.

Check out the other articles in our Best of 2021 series:

Java

Java remains one of the most important development platforms for enterprise use. Developers are eager to learn how to use their Java code and skills to build applications in modern distributed environments. So it's no surprise that this year's most popular Java article was the first installment in our series on making Java programs cloud-ready, An incremental approach using Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. Part two of the series, Upgrade the legacy Java application to Jakarta EE, garnered a lot of reader interest as well. For more on this topic, check out Markus Eisele and Natale Vinto's new book Modernizing Enterprise Java.

The recent release of JDK Flight Recorder and JDK Mission Control as open source was widely welcomed in the Java developer community. Our readers were interested in how they could use their VM monitoring and analytics capabilities in their own containerized projects. Andrew Azores delivered an Introduction to Cryostat: JDK Flight Recorder for containers, while Jie Kang discussed JDK Flight Recorder support for GraalVM Native Image.

Quarkus

This year, no Java-related topic garnered more reader interest than Quarkus, a Kubernetes-native Java stack for microservices and serverless development. Developers were very intrigued by Eric Deandrea's tutorial on migrating a Spring Boot application to Quarkus, which involved a little magic and a little madness. Read his e-book Quarkus for Spring Developers for a more in-depth look at this topic.

You can check out a host of other Quarkus-related tips and insights, from Daniel Oh's advice on how to build even faster Quarkus applications with fast-jar to Severin Gehwolf's deep dive into Mandrel, a specialized distribution of GraalVM for Quarkus.

Java, Quarkus, and RHEL

Doing Java and Quarkus development on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was another popular topic for our readers in 2021. Roman Martin Gil offered advice on integrating Spring Boot with Red Hat Integration Service Registry, while Syed M. Shaaf explained how to deploy Quarkus everywhere with RHEL. Those working with Red Hat Universal Base Images will also be interested in learning how to build lean Java containers with the new UBI OpenJDK runtime images.

Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka, an alternative enterprise messaging system that moves massive amounts of data, was another important application service technology our readers wanted to know more about in 2021. Berker Agir explained how you can use Quarkus to benchmark Kafka producer throughput. And if you work with Oracle databases, you'll want to learn how to capture Oracle database events in Apache Kafka with Debezium.

Camel K

Apache Camel is used widely for message queue integration and notification. The article Modernizing applications with Apache Camel, JavaScript, and Red Hat OpenShift provides an introduction to Camel K, a lightweight integration framework built from Apache Camel that is specifically designed for serverless and microservices architectures. Pasquale Congiusti takes you on a deeper dive into this framework with Design event-driven integrations with Kamelets and Camel K.

The rest of the best

Need more? Here are the rest of 2021's most popular articles from Red Hat Developer on Java, Quarkus, and other application support topics:

Find more Java resources on Red Hat Developer:

Last updated: October 6, 2022

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