InfoQ examined a number of smaller stories in the Java ecosystem from the week of February 15th, 2021.
The early-access builds of JDK17 were made available to the Java community complete with release notes and list of bug fixes. JDK 17, scheduled to be released in September 2021, will target JEP 356: Enhanced Pseudo-Random Number Generators as a new feature. This will provide new interface types and implementations for pseudorandom number generators. InfoQ recently forecasted what developers could expect in the upcoming releases JDK 16 and JDK 17.
In a recent update on Project Panama, it was revealed that the early-access builds had inadvertently been released without the dump extractor (jextract) utility that extracts files from a core dump. This is used in conjunction with the dump viewer (jdmpview) utility for analyzing the output from jextract. The issue was ultimately resolved within two days.
Frozen Arrays (Preview), a new JEP draft created earlier this month, introduces a new variation within the built-in Java array types designed to be unmodifiable or shallowly immutable. Frozen arrays may be safely shared without the risk of unexpected modification. This provides a more efficient alternative to defensive copying such that the copy may be optimized at runtime.
Pattern Matching for switch (Preview), a recently updated JEP draft, allows a target switch expression to be tested against a number of patterns, each with a specific action, allowing complex data-oriented queries to be expressed concisely and safely. Brian Goetz, Java language architect at Oracle, spoke to InfoQ in September 2017 when pattern matching was still in its proof-of-concept phase. Pattern matching for the instanceof operator (JEP 394) will be available in the upcoming release of JDK 16.
Less than two months after the GA release of Helidon 2.2 featuring support for MicroProfile GraphQL and integration with Micronaut Data, a small point release, Helidon 2.2.1, was made available to the Java community to address bug fixes, performance fixes and dependency upgrades.
Announced during their first quarter 2GM Town Hall meeting, Object Computing told the Java community to stay tuned for upcoming GA releases of Groovy, Grails and Micronaut. The event also featured a celebration of Grails 13th birthday and a contest to name the new Grails mascot. More details of the event may be found in the slides and the recording.
Spring Boot 2.5.0-M2 was made available with new features including support for Jetty 10, early support for Gradle 7 and alignment with upgraded versions of Spring Data 2021.0.0-M4, Spring Integration 5.5.0-M2 and Spring Security 5.5.0-M2 . More details may be found in the release notes.