This week's Java roundup for August 9th, 2021, features news from Project Loom, OpenJDK, JDK 18, JDK Mission Control, Spring Data, Quarkus 2.1.2.Final, Micronaut 3.0.0-RC1, Kotlin 1.5.20-RC, Piranha 21.8.0, JDKMon 16.0.8, and the EclipseCon 2021 Community Day agenda.
OpenJDK
JEP 417, Vector API (Third Incubator), has been promoted from Draft to Candidate status. Along with performance improvements, this JEP proposes to incorporate enhancements in response to feedback from the previous two rounds of incubation: JEP 414, Vector API (Second Incubator), and JEP 338, Vector API (Incubator). JEP 338 was integrated as an incubator module in JDK 16 and JEP 414 has been defined as one of the final JEPs targeted for JDK 17.
JDK 18
Build 10 of the JDK 18 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 9 that include fixes to various issues. More details may be found in the release notes.
For both JDK 17 and JDK 18, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
Project Loom
Build 18-loom+2-74 of the Project Loom early-access builds was made available to the Java community and based on Build 9 of the JDK 18 early access builds.
JDK Mission Control
Java Mission Control (JMC) 8.1 was made available as a source release. Binaries will be available once the downstream vendors provide them. This new release will require JDK 11+, but may still be used with OpenJDK 8u272+ and Oracle JDK 7u40+.
Along with bug fixes, developers can expect: support for Eclipse 2021-03; a new bundle to more efficiently serialize flight recording data to Graphviz and JSON; and a new JMC agent plug-in that may be configured to emit flight recording events in an already running JVM process.
Spring Framework
The Spring Data team was busy this past week as point and milestone releases were made available to the Java community.
Spring Data 2021.0.4 and 2020.0.12 were released featuring dependency upgrades and bug fixes for both versions that are built on top of Spring Framework 5.3.9. These versions may be consumed with the upcoming releases of Spring Boot 2.5.4 and 2.4.10, respectively.
On the road to Spring Data 2021.1.0, the second milestone release was made available, featuring numerous dependency upgrades. This release is also built on top of Spring Framework 5.3.9 and may be consumed through Spring Boot 5.6.0-M2.
Quarkus
Red Hat has provided a second maintenance release, Quarkus 2.1.2.Final, with dependency upgrades to JBoss Threads 3.4.2.Final, SmallRye Config 2.4.3, Hibernate ORM 5.5.6.Final along with numerous bug fixes. Further details may be found in the changelog.
The Road to Micronaut 3.0
After five milestone releases, Object Computing, Inc. has released Micronaut 3.0-RC1 featuring: project upgrades such as Google Cloud Platform 4.0.0-RC2, Flyway 4.1.0, Views 3.0.0-M2, and Servlet 3.0.0-RC2; support for JDK 17 with their annotation processors; and support to add stereotypes to existing annotations from a visitor.
Micronaut 2.5.12 was also released this past week featuring a number of bug fixes.
Kotlin
JetBrains has released Kotlin 1.5.30-RC featuring: updates to their experimental opt-in requirement mechanism for better consistency and less error-prone; the ability to create instances of annotation classes; promoting the Kotlin/JS compiler from alpha to beta; support for Java toolchains in Gradle; and improvements to the Regex and Duration API.
Piranha
Piranha 21.8.0 has been released. Dubbed the "let's do some more polishing" edition, this release features additional bug fixes to complement last month's fixes with their SonarCloud dependency. Further details may be found in their documentation and issue tracker.
JDKMon
The latest version of JDKMon, a new tool that monitors and updates installed JDKs, has been made available to the Java community. Created by Gerrit Grunwald, principal engineer at Azul, version 16.0.8 features support for the new IBM Semeru Runtimes and a bug fix that resolves a popup issue in Linux. More details may be found in this recent InfoQ news story.
Jakarta EE Community Day
Ivar Grimstad, Jakarta EE developer advocate at the Eclipse Foundation, announced that the agenda for the EclipseCon 2021 Community Day has been completed. Speakers include Tanja Obradovic, Ivar Grimstad, Emily Jiang, Arjan Tijms, Steve Millidge, Andy McCright and Otavio Santana. EclipseCon 2021 is scheduled for October 25-28, 2021.