This week's Java roundup for January 17th, 2022, features news from JDK 17, JDK 18, JDK 19, multiple Spring releases, Payara Platform, Open Liberty 22.0.0.1 and 22.0.0.2-beta, Quarkus 2.6.3.Final, WildFly 26.0.1 and 2022 release plan, Micronaut 3.2.7 and 3.3.0-M1, Hibernate ORM 5.6.4.Final and Hibernate Search 6.1.0-CR1, Liberica JDK 17.0.2, GraalVM 22 and JReleaser 0.10.0 and 1.0.0-M1.
JDK 17
As part of Oracle's Releases Critical Patch Update for January 2022, release updates for JDK 17.0.2, 11.0.14, 8u321 have been made available. More details may be found in the release notes for JDK 17, JDK 11 and JDK 8.
JDK 18
As per the JDK 18 release schedule, Mark Reinhold, chief architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, formally declared that JDK 18 has entered Rampdown Phase Two to signal the start of a stabilization mode for the GA release in March. Critical bugs, such as regressions or serious functionality issues, may be addressed, but must be approved via the Fix-Request process. The final set of nine (9) features for JDK 18 release will include:
- JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default
- JEP 408: Simple Web Server
- JEP 413: Code Snippets in Java API Documentation
- JEP 416: Reimplement Core Reflection with Method Handles
- JEP 417: Vector API (Third Incubator)
- JEP 418: Internet-Address Resolution SPI
- JEP 419: Foreign Function & Memory API (Second Incubator)
- JEP 420: Pattern Matching for switch (Second Preview)
- JEP 421: Deprecate Finalization for Removal
Build 32 of the JDK 18 early access builds was made available this past week, featuring updates from Build 31 that include fixes to various issues. More details may be found in the release notes.
JDK 19
Build 6 of the JDK 19 early-access builds was also made available this past week, featuring updates from Build 5 that include fixes to various issues. More details may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 18 and JDK 19, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
Spring Framework
Over at Spring, it was a very busy week as the team provided numerous point and milestone releases for Spring Boot, Spring Batch, Spring for GraphQL, Spring Security and Spring REST Docs.
The release of Spring Boot 2.6.3 provides 39 bug fixes, improvements in documentation and dependency upgrades such as Spring Framework 5.3.15, Spring Data 2021.1.1, Micrometer 1.8.2, Log4j2 2.17.1 and Hibernate 5.6.4.Final.
Spring Boot 2.5.9 was released featuring 32 bug fixes, improvements in documentation and dependency upgrades such as Spring Framework 5.3.15, Spring Data 2021.0.8, Micrometer 1.7.8, Log4j2 2.17.1 and Reactor 2020.0.15.
The release of Spring Boot 2.7.0-M1 provides 111 bug fixes, improvements in documentation and dependency upgrades. New features include: support for Spring GraphQL with a new starter; new actuator information endpoints to display operating system and Java vendor information; and support for the RabbitStreamTemplate class. More details may be found in the release notes.
On the road to Spring Boot 3.0, the first milestone release was made available. Spring Boot 3.0.0-M1 will require JDK 17+ and alignment to Jakarta EE 9 and a new milestone release is planned for every two months. More details may be found in the release notes.
Similarly, the release of Spring Batch 5.0-M1 will also require JDK 17+ and alignment with Jakarta EE 9. This release also features upgrades to dependencies to upcoming versions of Spring Framework 6.0. More details may be found in the changelog.
The release of Spring for GraphQL 1.0.0-M5 was primarily a follow up from the recent M4 release. In this release, the goal was to move the Spring Boot starter from the GraphQL repository to Spring Boot.
The first milestone versions of Spring Security 6.0.0 and 5.7.0 were made available. As with Spring Framework 6.0 and Spring Boot 3.0, the GA version of Spring Security 6.0 will require JDK 17+ and be aligned with Jakarta EE 9. Both versions ship with breaking changes, new features and dependency upgrades. More details may be found in the release notes for versions 6.0.0-M1 and 5.7.0-M1.
Spring REST Docs 2.0.6.RELEASE was released featuring 18 bug fixes and improvements in documentation. More details may be found in the release notes.
The first milestone release of Spring REST Docs 3.0.0 was made available featuring 13 enhancements, improvements in documentation and dependency upgrades. Spring REST Docs 3.0 will also require JDK 17+ and will be aligned with Jakarta EE 9. It is important to note that support for REST Assured has been temporarily removed as it is not yet compatible with Jakarta EE 9.
Payara
Payara has released the January 2022 edition of their Payara Platform as an enterprise-only release. Payara Platform Enterprise 5.35.0 edition delivers two improvements and seven bug fixes related to the Upgrade Tool, a utility to more efficiently upgrade to new versions of Payara Platform Enterprise.
Payara has also offered an upgraded version of the IntelliJ IDEA Payara Platform Tools plugin for both the Community and Ultimate editions of IntelliJ IDEA.
Open Liberty
IBM has promoted Open Liberty 22.0.0.1 from its beta release to deliver: support for MicroProfile 5.0; migrate the MicroProfile RestClient implementation from Apache CXF to RESTEasy; the ability to create OpenAPI documentation for more than one application; and support for receiving tokens in the JSON Web Encryption format via IBM's OpenID Connect Client 1.0 and Social Media Login 1.0.
Open Liberty 22.0.0.2-beta has been released to support Privacy-Enhanced Mail URL-encoded SSL certificates as line folding in HTTP headers has been deprecated.
Quarkus
Quarkus 2.6.3.Final, a maintenance release, features: a fully disabled JNDI service in the Hibernate ORM extension; upgrades to HIbernate ORM and Hibernate Reactive; avoid a NullPointerException upon collecting RESTEasy annotation providers on Resource classes; and update the Yasson library to support java 17 records. More details may be found in the change log.
WildFly
Red Hat has released WildFly 26.0.1, a small bug fix release that includes component upgrades for WildFly Core versions 18.0.1, 18.0.2, 18.0.3 and 18.0.4, Protocol Buffers (protobuf) 3.19.2 that resolves security vulnerability CVE-2021-22569, and Bootable JAR 7.0.0.
As a follow up to the Changes are Coming to WildFly blog post in September 2021, Red Hat has provided their 2022 Release Plan to include a change from time-boxed to feature-boxed releases for WildFly 27 and, most-likely, WildFly 28. This change was necessary because it would not have been practical to support the upcoming GA release of Jakarta EE 10 in a single time-boxed release. In the meantime, WildFly 26.1 and 26.1.1 are planned to be released in March and April, respectively.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released Micronaut 3.2.7 featuring: an upgrade to Netty 4.1.73.Final; a badge for Gradle Enterprise; and a jaxrs-server-security module to the Micronaut catalog.
On the road to Micronaut 3.3.0, the first milestone release features upgrades to other Micronaut projects such as Micronaut SQL Libraries, Micronaut Views, Micronaut Liquibase, Micronaut Picocli Configuration and Micronaut Kafka.
Hibernate
Hibernate ORM 5.6.4.Final has been released featuring new default methods, MultiTableBulkIdStrategy and Exporter, to ensure backwards compatibility with version 5.6.1.Final.
On the road to Hibernate Search 6.1.0, the first release candidate was made available to include: dependency upgrades to Hibernate ORM 5.6.3, Elasticsearch Client 7.16.3, JBoss Logging 3.4.3.Final, and SLF4J 1.7.33; better defaults and optional operators for the regexp predicate; and additional Maven artifacts compatible with Hibernate ORM 6.0.
Liberica
Concurrent with Oracle's Releases Critical Patch Update for January 2022, BellSoft has released versions 17.0.2, 11.0.14 and 8u322 of Liberica JDK, their downstream distribution of OpenJDK.
GraalVM
Oracle Labs has released GraalVM 22 Enterprise Edition to deliver new compiler optimizations and several improvements to Native Image for increased peak performance, lower memory requirements and smaller executables.
GraalVM 22 Community Edition, currently being tested, is scheduled to be released soon. InfoQ plans to follow up with a more detailed news story.
JReleaser
Version 0.10.0 of JReleaser, a Java utility that streamlines creating project releases, has been released that ships with breaking changes and is considered the last "push" towards the planned release of version 1.0.0. To that end, the first milestone version of version 1.0.0 was also released this past week featuring numerous new features and dependency upgrades.
InfoQ plans to follow up with a more detailed news story when the GA version JReleaser 1.0.0 is released.