The Road Not Taken: A Developer's Guide to Life Beyond Spring Boot
summary
Compares Spring Boot, Quarkus, Micronaut, Helidon, Javalin, HTTP4K and Ktor by building a small pet‑clinic REST API and running untuned benchmarks, finding Quarkus+Panache/Hibernate and Micronaut JPA hit an N+1 problem and only ~80 req/s, Quarkus with hand‑written SQL via JDBI exceeds >2000 rps, Spring Boot 4 with virtual threads is unexpectedly efficient and beats most real‑world database scenarios, Javalin records startup ~100ms, HTTP4K shows higher allocation churn, Helidon SE slightly outperforms Spring on raw throughput, and Ktor wins on plugin ecosystem and Kotlin coroutines.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction and disclaimers
- 1:09Why explore alternatives to Spring Boot
- 3:14Quarkus with Panache and JDBI
- 10:42Micronaut and its features
- 13:54Obscure frameworks overview
- 15:18Helidon server and editions
- 20:37Kotlin and Exposed ORM
- 23:50Javalin microframework
- 26:20HTTP4K and its flexibility
- 29:17Ktor by JetBrains
- 33:53Benchmarking methodology
- 34:56Benchmarking results and insights
- 41:58When to use which framework
- 45:13Q&A and resources
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