These are all the links of my presentation at Devoxx Belgium, Wednesday 12:00-12:50, Room 7.

As I’m becoming a senior developer in terms of age, I’ve transitioned from one language to another. One of my main interests has always been clean, easy-to-understand UIs (User Interface). That journey started for me with Director (to create multimedia CD-ROMs), Flash website animation, and Flex Rich Internet Applications (= “Flash on steroids”). When I started developing with Java over 10 years ago, we had some projects with the early versions of Vaadin and JavaFX. As I went on with serverside applications, I only continued with JavaFX for some personal and side projects, and loved the way you can create a UI both with XML (FXML actually) and code, exactly the same approach I loved with Flex. Since then, my love for Java and JavaFX only grew and it’s still my major programming environment.

For this post I did some experiments with Java 15, reusing the Ubuntu 64bit SD card which was also used for the earlier post “Comparing a REST H2 Spring versus Quarkus application on Raspberry Pi”.

Goal of this comparison

In my previous post “A Spring REST and H2 database application on the Raspberry Pi” an example was described to store sensors and measurements in a H2-database through REST API’s with a Spring application on the Raspberry Pi. This application takes some time to start on a Raspberry Pi, and Adam Bien who makes the airhacks.fm podcast asked me if I could compare this to a similar Quarkus application.

Java on Raspberry Pi

The “Pi” in the name of the Raspberry Pi refers to Python, but as a Java developer I love to know and experiment with the various Java frameworks I also use at work. Spring is the main one, and I wanted to develop a proof-of-concept application which provides REST API’s to store and retrieve sensor data with a database back-end on the Raspberry Pi.

Trisha Gee (Coder, blogger, speaker, Developer Advocate at JetBrains, @trisha_gee), which I interviewed for “Chapter 4: Choosing an IDE”, and Josh Long (Spring Developer Advocate at Pivotal, @starbuxman) worked together on a blog series in which they showed the power of reactive data produced by a Spring application. Instead of repeating a REST call each time you want to get data from the server, you do one call which returns a continuous stream in which new data is pushed based on an interval.

As I was learning Spring Boot myself, I thought the easiest way to learn was trying to build an example and write about it. So here we go… :-)