Quarkus 2.6.0.Final released - SmallRye Reactive Messaging 3.13 and Kafka 3, programmatic API for caching, Kotlin 1.6 and a lot more!

At the beginning of the Quarkus project, we didn’t have anything to properly host extensions outside of the Quarkus project, nor did we have infrastructure to, for instance, display external extensions on code.quarkus.io.

Since then, we have made a lot of progress and everything is in place to support external extensions, be they hosted in the Quarkiverse Hub or in other organizations/repositories.

The fact is that the Core had become very big (1000+ Maven modules) and it was the barrier of entry was high, be it to contribute to the Core itself or to one of the smaller extensions inside it.

We decided to move some of the extensions to the Quarkiverse Hub so that they are easier to contribute to and to allow us to reduce the size of the Core repository.

The extensions that have been moved are:

We tried our best to make sure the change would be seamless by putting together Maven relocations. So your applications should still work and you will see a warning asking you to move to the new extensions. If you have any issue with the migration, please report it and we will have a look.

You can find additional information on how to migrate to the new extensions in our migration guide.

If you are using these extensions, you are very welcome to contribute to them, now that the contribution is easier and doesn’t require building the whole Quarkus!

We keep track of their compatibility with the latest versions of Quarkus thanks to the Ecosystem CI and status.quarkus.io.

SmallRye Reactive Messaging was upgraded to 3.13 and the Kafka client has been upgraded to 3.0.0.

It took a while to get it in but, together with the annotation support for caching we had since a long time, there is now a programmatic API for caching coming with the Cache extension.

You can learn more about it in the dedicated section of the guide.

Our Dockerfile for native executables is now using quay.io/quarkus/quarkus-micro-image:1.0 as the base image. This image is based on UBI Micro and reduces the size of the native image.

Quarkus 2.6 adds support for built-in UPX compression of native executables. While it has some advantages, be aware it comes at a cost. Clément explained it at length in his dedicated blog post.

We improved a lot on the AWT support in native executables and you now have a dedicated extension for that quarkus-awt. Add it to your application if you are doing AWT work in native.

Until now, we generated all projects with Java 11 as the compilation source/target. We now define the compilation source/target as Java 17 for projects generated using Java 17.

We upgraded Kotlin to 1.6.

Camel 3.14 is the new LTS version of Camel. Compared to the previous LTS version (3.11), a lot of work has been done to bring new components, CamelJbang and Java 17 support. Improvements have been made to Core performance, Route configuration, and many components such as Kamelets and Kafka. For more details, check Apache Camel 3.14 What’s New.