It has been a fairly significant week in the OpenJDK ecosystem.
Two of the JEPs related to the delivery of Pattern Matching have reached Candidate status.
They are Pattern Matching for switch and records and array Patterns.
As previously reported by InfoQ, Pattern Matching is one of the major deliverables of Project Amber, which is making steady progress towards delivery, but which will definitely not produce final versions of its long-awaited features in time for Java 17 LTS.
Two security-related features have also made progress:
Remove RMI Activation and Dynamic Deserialization Features, which builds upon earlier work to lock down (and ultimately deprecate) the Java serialization mechanism.
In other security news, the Java applet API is now Targeted for Removal in Java 17.
The applet API was one of Java's original selling points - as a way of delivering rich client applications in the browser - and has been present since Java 1.0. In recent years, however, all mainstream browsers have removed support for this API as the browser has matured as an application delivery platform.
Java 17, nevertheless, will mark a sad milestone as this API is finally removed. With the removal of the Solaris port in Java 15, this will be the end of the road for the original vision of Java as a platform.
Moving on from OpenJDK and Java 17, it has also been 17 Years since the original version of Spring - version 1.0 - was released.
The Eclipse Foundation has also had a big week - the formal announcement of the formation of Eclipse Adoptium (the successor to AdoptOpenJDK) - and the news that Eclipse will be given access to the Java TCK - but also the Jetty Project announcing the release of Jetty 11.
Around the rest of the ecosystem, an open-source extension to VS Code for visualizing Java applications was announced (via Reddit).
Open Liberty has released version 21.0.0.3 which supports MicroProfile 4.0.
The Weld dependency injection framework announced release 4.0.1 - alongside 3.1.7 this largely deals with reflective access issues, in response to the release of Java 16, and the further tightening of access expected in Java 17.