It was very quiet for the week of December 25th, 2023, but InfoQ found a few news items of interest that include: Eclipse GlassFish 8.0.0-M1, Apache Camel 3.22.0, Gradle 8.6-RC1, an updated draft specification for JEP 455, and retrospectives into the 2023 highlights from Spring, BellSoft and WildFly.
OpenJDK
Aggelos Biboudis, principal member of technical staff at Oracle, has published an updated draft specification for JEP 455, Primitive types in Patterns, instanceof, and switch (Preview). This JEP, under the auspices of Project Amber and currently in Candidate status, proposes to enhance pattern matching by allowing primitive type patterns in all pattern contexts, and extend instanceof and switch to work with all primitive types.
JDK 23
There was no activity in the JDK 23 early-access builds this past week. Build 3 remains the latest update. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 22
Similarly, there was also no activity in the JDK 22 early-access builds. The latest update remains at Build 29. More details on this build may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 23 and JDK 22, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
Eclipse GlassFish
The first milestone release of Eclipse GlassFish 8.0.0 delivers support for Jakarta EE 11-M1 with full implementations of the Jakarta Security 4.0.0-M1 and Jakarta Faces 4.1.0-M1 specifications, and a partial implementation of the Jakarta Servlet 6.1.0-M1 specification. JDK 17 is the required minimal version at this time, but may be updated to JDK 21 in the next milestone release. There is support for JDK 21, and the final version of GlassFish 8 is targeted to certify on JDK 21 for Jakarta EE 11. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
GraalVM
Oracle has announced that Oracle GraalVM is now available as a Paketo buildpack. In collaboration with the Paketo team, Oracle GraalVM has been integrated into the Oracle buildpack. This allows developers to add both the Native Image and Oracle buildpacks to a buildpack configuration file for executing the application.
Apache Software Foundation
The release of Apache Camel 3.22.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrade and new features/improvements such as: support for start and end dates in the Camel Quartz component; the ability to use the old Micrometer meter names or follow the new Micrometer naming conventions; and provide a tracing strategy to trace each processor for Camel OpenTelemetry as part of the migration process from Camel OpenTracing. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Gradle
The first release candidate of Gradle 8.6 provides: support for custom encryption keys in the configuration cache via the GRADLE_ENCRYPTION_KEY environment variable; improvements in error and warning reporting; improvements in the Build Init Plugin to support various types of projects; and enhanced build authoring for plugin authors and build engineers to develop custom build logic. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Framework
Josh Long, Spring developer advocate at Broadcom, published This Year in Spring - 2023, a retrospective into the 2023 highlights. These include: support for Artificial Intelligence with the introduction of the Spring AI project; continued GraalVM native image support in Spring Boot 3.0+; support for virtual threads and Project Loom; support for Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) with the release of Spring Boot 3.2; support for Docker-driven development where Spring Boot can derive connectivity information from either a local Docker Compose description file or Testcontainers; and the release of Spring Modulith 1.0 that provides production-readiness, IDE support and improved testability.
Long also published the latest edition of his A Bootiful Podcast with Joris Kuipers, CTO at Trifork and former senior consultant at VMware. Recorded live in October 2023 from the SpringOne tour in Amsterdam, Long spoke to Kuipers about topics such as his career, the Spring ecosystem and GraalVM. They also answered questions via chat from attendees.
BellSoft
Alex Belokrylov, CEO at BellSoft, provided a retrospective into BellSoft's 2023 highlights, noting:
This year was filled with overcoming challenges, seizing opportunities, taking part in fruitful engagements, and participating in unforgettable events.
Technical highlights included: the introduction of Alpaquita Containers; launch of the Performance Edition line with the release of Liberica JDK 11 Performance Edition; introduction of Liberica JDK with CRaC; and ongoing commitment to OpenJDK and GraalVM that includes four quarterly releases with security patches and critical fixes.
Highlights of BellSoft's engagement with the Java community included: 30 presentations at 28 global events, such as JNation and Devoxx, by Dmitry Chuyko, performance architect at Bellsoft; and participation in the 25th anniversary celebration of the Java Community Process in New York City in September 2023.
WildFly
Brian Stansberry, senior principal software engineer at Red Hat, provided an end-of-year summary on Wildfly and the contributions by the Java community. Highlights included: three major version releases of WildFly 28, 29 and 30; new extensions for the MicroProfile Telemetry and MicroProfile Long-Running Actions specifications; implementations of most of the MicroProfile 6.0 specification, with updates to MicroProfile 6.1 in the upcoming release of WildFly 31; support for JDK 21; more than 2000 issues and enhancements resolved in the WildFly main code; and a license change of the WildFly code base to Apache License 2.0.
There was also a significant amount of work on improving documentation and tooling related to getting started with WildFly. Stansberry also announced that WildFly 31 will be released in January 2024.