This week's Java roundup for August 16th, 2021, features news from Micronaut 3.0, OpenJDK, JDK 18, updates to Spring Boot and Spring Tools, a new Open Liberty starter tool, GraalVM Native Build Tools 0.9.3, Payara Platform updates, Quarkus 2.1.3, Eclipse OpenMQ 6.2 and the July update of Java in Visual Studio Code.
OpenJDK
JEP 400, UTF-8 by Default, has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target status for JDK 18. This JEP specifies that UTF-8 is the default character set of the standard Java APIs to ensure consistency across all implementations, operating systems, locales, and configurations.
JDK 17
JDK 17 has entered its final release candidate phase this past week. As per the JDK release process, the JDK 17 stabilization repository is only open for critical bug fixes. This phase will be in effect until the GA release on September 14, 2021.
JDK 18
Build 11 of the JDK 18 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 10 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.
Spring Framework
It was a busy week over at Spring as there were multiple point releases for Spring Boot, Spring Authorization Server and Spring Tools.
Minor point releases of Spring Boot version 2.5.4 and version 2.4.10 featuring 35 bug fixes and 29 bug fixes, respectively, were made available that included dependency upgrades and improvements to the documentation for both versions.
On the road to Spring Boot 2.6.0, the second milestone release was made available featuring more than 100 bug fixes, documentation improvements, and dependency upgrades. New features include: easier configuration for the AbstractApplicationContextRunner class; auto-configuration for spring-rabbit-stream; support for dumping the heap when running on Open J9; and drop dependency management for the org.jboss:jboss-transaction-spi artifact.
In conjunction with the initial production release of version 0.2.0, the Spring Authorization Server has officially been promoted from experimental status into the portfolio of the Spring Projects.
Version 4.11.1 of Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia was released this past week featuring issues related to: the Spring Boot extension and Codespaces in which the extension initiates multiple times and doesn’t find the correct JDK; an incorrect error message related to the JAVA_HOME environment variable; and add missing properties to the GitResource schema. Developers can expect version 4.12.0 to be released in late September 2021.
Micronaut 3.0
After five milestone releases and one release candidate, Object Computing, Inc. has released Micronaut 3.0. New features include: a migration from RxJava2 to Project Reactor; a change in the way annotations are inherited via the explicit use of @Inherited for all annotations; a migration of the annotations, @PreDestroy and @PostConstruct, to the jakarta.annotation namespace; and improvements to Inversion of Control. InfoQ will follow-up with a more detailed news story.
Payara
Payara has released their August 2021 edition of the Payara Platform. Community Edition 5.2021.6 offers seven bug fixes, one component upgrade and two security fixes. Enterprise Edition 5.30.0 includes eight bug fixes, two component upgrades and two security fixes. New features include: support for multi-tenant control for OIDC security; a security vulnerability fix in the Jackson-Databind dependency; and support for MicroProfile 4.1, the latest version of MicroProfile.
Quarkus
Red Hat has released Quarkus 2.1.3.Final, the third maintenance release on top of Quarkus 2.1, featuring: the ability to configure the registry URL from an environmental variable; the ability to define unique roles when creating users in Keycloak Dev Services; prevent an infinite loop using the write() method of the Aesh console; and fixing a RESTEasy reactive endpoint issue. Further details may be found in the changelog.
OpenLiberty
IBM has introduced Open Liberty Starter to build Open Liberty applications. The files, RestApplication.java, server.xml and Dockerfile, are generated based on the versions of Java, Jakarta EE and MicroProfile that have been selected. This new utility joins the number of other starter utilities such as Spring Initializr, Micronaut Launch and Quarkus Code Generator.
Eclipse OpenMQ
OpenMQ 6.2, an implementation of Java Message Service specification, has been made available by the Eclipse Foundation and will be included in the upcoming release of GlassFish 6.2.1.
GraalVM
Oracle Labs has released version 0.9.3 of Native Build Tools, a GraalVM project consisting of plugins for interoperability with GraalVM Native Image. This release provides fixes for a number of issues related to Gradle such as the mainClass configuration not being optional and removing the broken server configuration. The latter introduces breaking changes. Other new features include: replacing the library for generating JSON files from groovy-json to jackson-databind; and adding a sharedLibrary configuration for the Gradle plugin.
Java in Visual Studio Code
The July 2021 update of Java in Visual Studio Code features Java extensions that adopt the new Visual Studio Code Testing API that includes a new testing decoration in the IDE, and improved test explorer and test message output. There were also Improvements to their Maven dependency management and an update to the Java in Visual Studio Code roadmap for the second half of 2021.