This week's Java roundup for April 22nd, 2024, features news highlighting: the release of WildFly 32; JEP 476, Module Import Declarations (Preview), JEP 474, ZGC: Generational Mode by Default, and JEP 467, Markdown Documentation Comments, proposed to target for JDK 23; Hibernate ORM 6.5; and JobRunr 7.1.
OpenJDK
One week after having been declared a candidate, JEP 476, Module Import Declarations (Preview), has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 23. This preview feature proposes to enhance the Java programming language with the ability to succinctly import all of the packages exported by a module with a goal to simplify the reuse of modular libraries without requiring to import code to be in a module itself. The review is expected to conclude on May 1, 2024.
JEP 474, ZGC: Generational Mode by Default, has also been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 23. This JEP proposes to use the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) from non-generational to generational mode by default. The non-generational mode will be deprecated and removed in a future JDK release. This will ultimately reduce the cost of maintaining the two modes such that future development can primarily focus on JEP 439, Generational ZGC. The review is expected to conclude on April 30, 2024. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
JEP 467, Markdown Documentation Comments, has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 23. This feature proposes to enable JavaDoc documentation comments to be written in Markdown rather than a mix of HTML and JavaDoc @ tags. This will allow for documentation comments that are easier to write and easier to read in source form. The review is expected to conclude on May 4, 2024. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
JDK 23
Build 20 of the JDK 23 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 19 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
BellSoft
BellSoft has released versions 24.0.1 for JDK 22, 23.1.3 for JDK 21 and 23.0.4 for JDK 17 of their Liberica Native Image Kit builds as part of the Oracle Critical Patch Update for April 2024 to address several security and bug fixes. A total of 10 CVEs have been resolved. These include: CVE-2023-41993, a vulnerability in which processing web content may lead to arbitrary code execution; and CVE-2024-21085, a vulnerability in which an unauthenticated attacker, with network access via multiple protocols, can compromise Oracle Java SE and Oracle GraalVM Enterprise Edition resulting in the unauthorized ability to cause a partial denial of service.
Spring Framework
Versions 3.3.0-M1 3.2.4 and 3.1.11 of Spring Shell have been released featuring notable resolutions to issues such as: use of the GridView class with zero column/row sizes causing an item to be placed into the bottom-right when user expects it to be in the top-left; and a race condition and resulting ConcurrentModificationException, primarily seen on WindowsOS, from the TerminalUI class when updating the screen. These releases build on Spring Boot 3.3.0-RC1, 3.2.5 and 3.1.11, respectively. More details on this release may be found in the release notes for version 3.3.0-M1, version 3.2.4 and version 3.1.11.
WildFly
The release of WildFly 32 features the version 1.0 release of WildFly Glow, a set of command-line provisioning tools that analyzes deployments and identifies the set of Galleon feature-packs and Galleon layers that are required by applications. Along with bug fixes and dependency upgrades, other new features include: support for the Jakarta MVC 2.1 specification; support for an instance of the Java SSLContext class that can dynamically delegate to different SSL contexts based on the destination’s host and port; and the ability to create channels defining component versions used to provision WildFly using the WildFly Channel project that may be separately maintained from WildFly’s feature packs. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released version 4.4.1 of the Micronaut Framework featuring Micronaut Core 4.4.6, bug fixes, improvements in documentation, and updates to modules: Micronaut Views, Micronaut gRPC, Micronaut Test Resources and Micronaut Maven Plugin. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
IBM has released version 24.0.0.4 of Open Liberty featuring: support for JDK 22; and updates to eight (8) Open Liberty guides to use the MicroProfile Reactive Messaging 3.0, MicroProfile 6.1 and Jakarta EE 10 specifications. There were also security fixes for: CVE-2023-51775, a vulnerability in the Javascript Object Signing and Encryption for Java (jose4j component) before version 0.9.4 that allows an attacker to cause a denial of service via a large PBES2 value; and CVE-2024-27270, a cross-site scripting vulnerability in IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty 23.0.0.3 through 24.0.0.3 that allows an attacker to embed arbitrary JavaScript code in a specially crafted URI.
Helidon
The release of Helidon 4.0.8 ships with notable changes such as: support for a span event listener with a new SpanListener interface for improved tracing callbacks; and the use of delegation instead of inheritance from the Java BufferedOutputStream class to ensure the use of virtual thread-friendly locks in the JDK code and avoids thread pinning due to synchronized blocks in the JDK. Further details on this release may be found in the changelog.
Hibernate
The release of Hibernate ORM 6.5.0.Final delivers new features such as: Java time objects marshaled directly through the JDBC driver as defined by JDBC 4.2 to replace the use of java.sql.Date, java.sql.Time or java.sql.Timestamp classes; a configurable query cache layout to minimize higher memory consumption from storing the full data in the cache; and support for Java records as a parameter in the Jakarta Persistence @IdClass annotation; and support for auto-enabled filters. This release also includes a technical preview of the Jakarta Data specification that will be included in the upcoming release of Jakarta EE 11.
Apache Software Foundation
The release of Apache Camel 4.4.2 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: the ability to set the error handler on the route level to complement the existing error handler on the global lever in the Camel YAML DSL component; and support for the restConfiguration property in the Camel XML IO DSL component. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Similarly, version 4.0.5 of Apache Camel has also been released with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvement such as: a resolution to the PubSubApiConsumer class failing to load the POJO enum, defined in PubSubDeserializeType, on some platforms in the Camel Salesforce component; and a more robust way to obtain the correlationID for brokers in the Camel JMS component. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JobRunr
Version 7.1.0 of JobRunr, a library for background processing in Java that is distributed and backed by persistent storage, has been released to deliver bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for virtual threads when using GraalVM Native mode; and improved initialization of the BackgroundJobServer class in Spring with improved support for JSR 310, Date and Time API. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Details on the new features of JobRunr 7.0.0, released on April 9, 2024, may be found in this webinar hosted by Ron Dehuysser, creator of JobRunr.
JDKUpdater
Versions 14.0.39+69 of JDKUpdater, a new utility that provides developers the ability to keep track of updates related to builds of OpenJDK and GraalVM. Introduced in mid-March by Gerrit Grunwald, principal engineer at Azul, this new release includes: a resolution to an issue related to the latest download view closing problem; and the ability to open the latest version download view from notification. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
TornadoVM
TornadoVM has announced that SAPMachine, a downstream distribution of OpenJDK maintained by SAP, has been added to their TornadoVM Installer utility. This complements the existing downstream distributions, namely: Oracle OpenJDK, Amazon Corretto, GraalVM and Mandrel.
Gradle
The first release candidate of Gradle 8.8 delivers: full support for JDK 22; a preview feature to configure the Gradle daemon JVM using toolchains; improved IDE performance with large projects; and improvements to build authoring, error and warning messages, the build cache, and the configuration cache. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.