This week's roundup features news from OpenJDK JEPs targeted for JDK 17, point releases for Helidon, Quarkus, Open Liberty and Hibernate, and a flurry of activity with the various Spring projects.
It was a busy week at OpenJDK as there were updates to some JEPs and the JDK 17 early access builds. Labeled as Build 23, there are numerous changes from Build 22 that include fixes to various issues.
Two JEPs, JEP 412: Foreign Function & Memory API (Incubator) and JEP 414: Vector API (Second Incubator) were promoted from Proposed to Target to Targeted status yielding this updated list of JEPs targeted for the JDK 17 GA release in September:
- 356: Enhanced Pseudo-Random Number Generators
- 382: New macOS Rendering Pipeline
- 391: macOS/AArch64 Port
- 398: Deprecate the Applet API for Removal
- 409: Sealed Classes
- 410: Remove the Experimental AOT and JIT Compiler
- 412: Foreign Function & Memory API (Incubator)
- 414: Vector API (Second Incubator)
Still under review, there are proposed JEPs for JDK 17 that were recently promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target status:
- 306: Restore Always-Strict Floating-Point Semantics - review ends May 27, 2021
- 403: Strongly Encapsulate JDK Internals - review ends May 25, 2021
- 406: Pattern Matching for switch (Preview) - review ends May 26, 2021
- 407: Remove RMI Activation - review ends May 24, 2021
- 411: Deprecate the Security Manager for Removal - review ends May 27, 2021
More details may be found in the release notes and developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
Oracle has released Helidon 2.3.0 with new features and enhancements including cloud integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and support for HashiCorp Vault and the Micrometer specification. There is also an integration with Neo4J.
On the road to Quarkus 2.0, Red Hat has released version 2.0.0.Alpha3 featuring support for GraalVM 21.1.0 and SmallRye GraphQL Client. Along with major changes in the SmallRye components and support for Vert.x 4.0 and MicroProfile 4.0, Quarkus 2.0 will introduce a new continuous testing feature that provides continuous feedback during code changes. InfoQ will follow-up with a detailed news story related to continuous testing.
The latest monthly release of Open Liberty 21.0.0.5 features support for JDK 16, LDAP connection support for Kerberos authentication, multipart payloads for JAX-RS, and notable bug fixes.
On the road to Hibernate ORM 5.5.0, Hibernate has released version 5.5.0.Beta1 with bug fixes and a few minor improvements. This has been a work-in-progress to ultimately support the Jakarta Persistence 3.0 specification. New artifacts using the -jakarta suffix (e.g., hibernate-core-jakarta) have been introduced as part of this on-going development. More details may be found in the What's New section of the website.
And finally, it was another very busy week at Spring as a number of major and minor point releases on some of their projects were made available to the Java community.
Spring Boot 2.5 features support for JDK 16 and Gradle 7, enhanced Docker image building and a new mechanism for Datasource initialization. More information may be found in the release notes.
Related to Spring Boot are minor point releases of Spring Boot 2.3.11 and Spring Boot 2.4.6 featuring 52 bug fixes and 84 bug fixes, respectively, along with documentation improvements and dependency upgrades for both versions.
Spring Security 5.5 was made available with breaking changes such as: renaming the DelegatingAuthorizationManager class to RequestMatcherDelegatingAuthorizationManager; and the ResourceKeyConverterAdapter class having been inlined. With the latter, there was no longer a need to simplify the configuration using the ConversionService interface in Spring Boot applications. Further details may be found on the What's New section of the documentation.
Spring Integration 5.5 has been released featuring support for Spring Native, an experimental project that converts Spring Boot applications to GraalVM native images. There is also a patch release of Spring Integration 5.4.7 containing critical bug fixes. More details are available in the What's New section of the documentation and a migration guide for Spring Integration 5.5 provides information on potential breaking changes.
Related to Spring Integration is the release of Spring Integration for AWS 2.5 featuring a move away from Spring Cloud for AWS to its own separate entity, Spring Cloud AWS, that will support a subset of AWS services within Spring Boot applications.
A number of minor point releases for the Spring Batch, Spring AMQP and Spring for Apache Kafka projects were made available this past week featuring bug fixes, improvements and dependency updates:
- Spring Batch versions 4.2.7.RELEASE and 4.3.3
- Spring AMQP versions 2.2.17.RELEASE and 2.3.7
- Spring for Apache Kafka versions 2.5.13.RELEASE, 2.6.8 and 2.7.1
Spring Web Services 3.1.1 has been released under a new versioning scheme in which the .RELEASE extension has been eliminated. Dependency upgrades include Spring Framework 5.3.7 and Spring Security 5.5.0. The web services team now tests on JDK 16 to complement testing on JDK 8 and JDK 11.
