Red Hat is bidding to make Java relevant to the container age and spread “developer joy” after taking the wraps off Quarkus, which it is subheading “supersonic, subatomic Java”.

Red Hat describes Quarkus as a “Kubernetes Native Java framework tailored for GraalVM and HotSpot, crafted from best-of-breed Java libraries and standards”.

In an intro to the project, co-founder and Red Hat distinguished engineer Jason Greene notes that Java was “born in the mid-90s and has nearly twenty years of optimizations for running highly dynamic monolithic applications that assumed sole ownership of (virtualized) host CPU and memory.”

Which depending on your point of view is not exactly where things are heading these days. Hence, Greene continues, the aim with Quarkus is to make Java a leading platform in “Kubernetes and serverless environments while offering developers a unified reactive and imperative programming model to optimally address a wider range of distributed application architectures. “

Red Hat claims the framework delivers “significant runtime efficiencies” with Fast Startup in the tens of milliseconds helping auto scaling of microservices on containers and kubernetes, while low memory utilization helps container density.

Best of all, depending on your point of view, Quarkus is described as “a cohesive platform for developer joy” with all configuration in a single property file, and streamlined code for 80 per cent of common usages.

The project is open source, of course, under an Apache license, and is soliciting new contributors, particularly for extensions. You can download the framework and join the community there.

And if the phrase supersonic subatomic sounds familiar? You just might be a Jason Mraz fan.