This week's Java roundup for September 13th, 2021, features news from OpenJDK, a proposal to accelerate the JDK LTS release cadence from three years to two years, JDK 18, Liberica JDK 17, updates to Spring Framework, Spring Data and Spring Tools 4, Payara Platform, Helidon, JDK 17 development builds of GraalVM, Hibernate, Piranha, Apache Camel, JobRunr 4.0 and the 2021 Jakarta EE Developer survey.
OpenJDK
JEP 417, Vector API (Third Incubator), has been promoted from Candidate to Targeted status for JDK 18. 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 was delivered in JDK 17.
Concurrent with the release of Java 17, Mark Reinhold, chief architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, proposed accelerating the current long-term support (LTS) release cadence of every three years to every two years. Reinhold states that this proposal would have no effect on main-line feature releases within the JDK Project, but would, however, affect the JDK Updates Projects in terms of additional work. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
Jim Laskey, director of software development at Oracle, and Brian Goetz, Java language architect at Oracle, resurrected their proposal to offer string interpolation beyond text blocks introduced in Java 15. As a commonly requested feature, there are benefits for string interpolation in the Java programming language. However, Laskey and Goetz are concerned over possible injection attacks and limitations to localization and formatting.
JDK 17
Oracle has released version 17 of the Java programming language and virtual machine this past week. As the first long-term support (LTS) release since JDK 11 in 2018, there are 14 JEPs in the final feature set. A more detailed InfoQ news story on this latest release may be found here.
JDK 18
Build 15 of the JDK 18 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 14 that include fixes to various issues. More details may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 18, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
Liberica JDK 17
BellSoft has released their latest downstream distribution of OpenJDK, Liberica JDK 17, offering additional features and tools such as LibericaFX, an instance of JavaFX, and Liberica Native Image Kit for native images.
Spring Framework
After a very quiet previous week, it was a busy week over at Spring as there were a number of point releases for their various projects.
Minor point releases of Spring Framework version 5.3.10 and version 5.2.17.RELEASE have been made available featuring 45 bug fixes and 13 bug fixes, respectively, that included dependency upgrades and improvements to the documentation for both versions.
Spring Data 2021.0.5 and 2020.0.13 were released featuring dependency upgrades and bug fixes for both versions that are built on top of Spring Framework 5.3.10. These versions may be consumed with the upcoming releases of Spring Boot 2.5.5 and 2.4.11, respectively.
On the road to Spring Data 2021.1.0, the third milestone release was made available featuring numerous dependency upgrades, bug fixes and improved support for MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch and Neo4J. Spring Data 2021.1.0-M3 may be consumed through the upcoming release of Spring Boot 5.6.0-M3. This is also the last milestone before a planned RC phase in mid-October and a GA release in November.
Version 4.12.0 of Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia was released this past week featuring an update to Eclipse 2021-09, Java 17 support via a separate plugin, and early-access builds for the Apple Silicon platform (ARM M1).
Payara
Payara has released their September 2021 edition of the Payara Platform. Payara Platform Community 5.2021.7 and Payara Platform Enterprise 5.31.0 each contain 10 bug fixes, one component upgrade, one security fix and one new feature. The security fix was necessary due to the discovery of a Path Traversal vulnerability in which, under certain conditions, a hacker would be able to read from the file system of the server running an application. More details may be found in the release notes for Community and Enterprise editions.
Helidon
Oracle has released Helidon 2.3.3 featuring bug fixes and performance improvements to the WebServer, WebClient, Fault Tolerance, Tracing and Metrics components. More details may be found in the release notes.
GraalVM
Development builds of GraalVM based on JDK 17 have been made available to the Java community. Developers are encouraged to experiment with these builds and provide feedback.
Hibernate
Hibernate has announced an "all systems go for Java 17" meaning that their maintained branches have been regularly tested with early releases of OpenJDK 17. More specifically, these branches include Hibernate ORM 5.3+, Hibernate Search 5.11+ and Hibernate Validator 6.2+.
Piranha
Piranha 21.9.0 has been released. Dubbed the "small steps" edition, this release features: a new groupId and artifactId for Piranha Micro to reflect that it is now part of a multi-module project; and fixes for some TCK issues. Further details may be found in their documentation and issue tracker.
Apache Camel
Apache has released Camel 3.11.2, an LTS release featuring 28 bug fixes and improvements including dependency upgrades to Spring Boot 2.5.4, Apache Commons Compress 1.21, XChange 5.0.11 and Camel Karaf. More details may be found in the release notes.
JobRunr
JobRunr, a utility to perform background processing in Java, has released version 4.0 to include a number of new features such as: a performance mode that checks if a job can be cached; new JobRequest and JobRequestHandler interfaces for creating new background jobs; and an updated JobRunr Spring Boot Starter, new Micronaut integration and a new Quarkus extension. InfoQ will follow-up with a more detailed news story.
Jakarta EE Survey
The 2021 Jakarta EE Developer Survey Report has been made available to the Java community. Some highlights from the executive summary include:
- The Jakarta EE community is looking for faster support from existing Java EE/Jakarta EE and cloud vendors.
- Over 48% of respondents have either already migrated to Jakarta EE or plan to within the next 6-24 months.
- Spring/Spring Boot continues to be the leading framework for building cloud native applications (60%), with its share increasing by 16 points (up from 44% in 2020).
- MicroProfile adoption has increased to 34% (vs 29% in 2020).
A total of 940 developers participated in this survey from April 6 through May 31, 2021.