@jeqo

Shipping CLI binaries with Java hasn’t been the most user-friendly experience. Java is required to be installed on the client-side, starting Java applications (e.g. executable JAR) tend to be slower than to binary applications. GraalVM, and specifically native-image tooling, is aimed to tackle most of these issues with Java by enable building native binaries from Java applications. Even though this has been supported for a while now, reflection and other practices require additional configurations that make this process either unsupported or very cumbersome to implement. With the arrival of new frameworks that target the benefits of GraalVM, like Micronaut and Quarkus, it started to be possible and simpler to implement applications that included Kafka clients, and package them as native binaries. This post is going to explore the steps to package vanilla Kafka client applications —i.e. no framework— as native binaries.

Packaging and releasing Java applications (e.g. CLI) tend to be cumbersome, and the user-experience tended not to be the best as users have to download a valid version of JRE, etc.