It's been a busy week for celebrations within the Java ecosystem especially with the upcoming release of Java 16 and 25 years of Java. Along with other news from IBM, Red Hat and Spring, InfoQ examined a number of these smaller stories from the week of March 1, 2021.
Oracle is celebrating 25 years of Java by offering a free Java learning subscription and the Java SE 11 Developer Certification Exam for only $25 - a 90% discount. The Java learning subscription includes: the Java Explorer learning path for basic Java skills; the Java SE 11 Developer OCP - Java 25 Years learning path for advanced programming skills; and practice questions to review in preparation for the exam.
Only after subscribing to the free Java learning subscription, developers may register for the discounted certification exam and schedule to take the exam between February 25th and April 25th, 2021.
In the OpenJDK space, the Java Microbenchmark Harness (JMH) 1.28 is now available with new features and bug fixes. Aleksey Shipilёv, principal software engineer at Red Hat, described one of the new features, writing:
JMH experimental support for compiler-assisted blackholes was reworked. The compiler blackhole support was reverted from JDK 16, and it would probably reappear in a slightly different form in JDK 17. JMH code was future-proofed to match it.
-Djmh.blackhole.mode=COMPILERcan be used to enable it experimentally.
A prospective JDK 17+ patch is available at this GitHub repository and Shipilёv offers the binaries built with that patch on his site of Peculiar (JVM) Builds.
The Foojay community has kicked-off a virtual JUG tour to introduce Foojay.io as a collaborative platform for users of Java and OpenJDK. During the months of March and April, Foojay contributors will be making a "whistle stop tour" to as many Java User Groups as possible.
Foojay, a portmanteau blend of friends of OpenJDK, is a community site for developers who use, target, and run their applications on top of Java and OpenJDK. Organizations comprising the advisory board include Azul, Datadog, DataStax, jFrog, Payara and Snyk.
The agenda for each tour stop will include a brief introduction to Foojay.io followed by a 30-minute session presented by a Foojay community member.
To celebrate the upcoming release of Java 16, Java enthusiast, Nicolai Parlog, has announced a Java 16 Release Party on March 16th, 2021 that will be hosted on his personal Twitch.tv channel. Parlog will introduce some new features of Java 16 before special guests, Stuart Marks and Chris Hegarty, both consulting members of technical staff at Oracle, will discuss the API evolution and records.
Over at IBM, it was announced that Open Liberty 21.0.0.3-beta is now Jakarta EE 9 compatible. Open Liberty joins GlassFish 6 to be certified as a Jakarta EE 9 compatible product and the TCK results are available in the Jakarta EE Platform 9 Certification Summary.
IBM has also entered into a strategic partnership with Microsoft to broaden the reach of Jakarta EE on Microsoft Azure with marketplace solutions for WebSphere and Open Liberty.
The Spring team has released Spring Integration Zip 1.0.4 that addresses the zip-slip vulnerability, CVE-2021-22114. Zip, one of the many extensions within the Spring Integration project, provides compression and uncompression support with the components ZipTransformer, UnZipTransformer and UnZipResultSplitter.
The Red Hat acquisition of StackRox earlier this year has passed regulatory review allowing the deal to move forward. StackRox, a company focused on container and Kubernetes-native security, will bring these security capabilities to Red Hat OpenShift.