This week's Java roundup for May 6th, 2024, features news highlighting: the May edition of the Payara Platform; and new JEP candidates, namely: JEP 477, Implicitly Declared Classes and Instance Main Methods (Third Preview), JEP 480, Structured Concurrency (Third Preview), JEP 479, Remove the Windows 32-bit x86 Port, and JEP 478, Key Derivation API (Preview).
OpenJDK
JEP 467, Markdown Documentation Comments, has been promoted from Proposed to Target to Targeted 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.
JEP 477, Implicitly Declared Classes and Instance Main Methods (Third Preview), has been promoted from its JEP Draft 8323335 to Candidate status. Formerly known as Unnamed Classes and Instance Main Methods (Preview), Flexible Main Methods and Anonymous Main Classes (Preview) and Implicit Classes and Enhanced Main Methods (Preview), this JEP incorporates enhancements in response to feedback from the two previous rounds of preview, namely JEP 463, Implicit Classes and Instance Main Methods (Second Preview), to be delivered in the upcoming release of JDK 22, and JEP 445, Unnamed Classes and Instance Main Methods (Preview), delivered in JDK 21. This JEP proposes to "evolve the Java language so that students can write their first programs without needing to understand language features designed for large programs." This JEP moves forward the September 2022 blog post, Paving the on-ramp, by Brian Goetz, Java language architect at Oracle. The latest draft of the specification document by Gavin Bierman, consulting member of technical staff at Oracle, is open for review by the Java community. More details on JEP 445 may be found in this InfoQ news story.
JEP 480, Structured Concurrency (Third Preview), has been promoted from its JEP Draft 8330818 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes a third preview, without change, in order to gain more feedback from the previous two rounds of preview, namely: JEP 462, Structured Concurrency (Second Preview), delivered in JDK 22; and JEP 453, Structured Concurrency (Preview), delivered in JDK 21. This feature simplifies concurrent programming by introducing structured concurrency to "treat groups of related tasks running in different threads as a single unit of work, thereby streamlining error handling and cancellation, improving reliability, and enhancing observability."
JEP 479, Remove the Windows 32-bit x86 Port, has been promoted from its JEP Draft 8330623 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes to fully remove the Windows 32-bit x86 port following its deprecation as described in JEP 449, Deprecate the Windows 32-bit x86 Port for Removal, delivered in JDK 21. The goals are to: remove all code paths in the code base that apply only to Windows 32-bit; cease all testing and development efforts targeting the Windows 32-bit platform; and simplify OpenJDK's build and test infrastructure, aligning with current computing standards.
JEP 478, Key Derivation API (Preview), has been promoted from its JEP Draft 8189808 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes to introduce an API for Key Derivation Functions (KDFs), cryptographic algorithms for deriving additional keys from a secret key and other data, with goals to: allow security providers to implement KDF algorithms in either Java or native code; and enable the use of KDFs in implementations of JEP 452, Key Encapsulation Mechanism.
JDK 23
Build 22 of the JDK 23 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 21 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Framework
It was a quiet week over at Spring, however the latest edition of A Bootiful Podcast, facilitated by Josh Long, spring developer advocate at Broadcom, was published this past week featuring Spring Boot co-founders, Phil Webb, software engineer at Broadcom, and Dr. David Syer, senior staff engineer at Broadcom, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the release of Spring Boot 1.0.
Payara
Payara has released their May 2024 edition of the Payara Platform that includes Community Edition 6.2024.5 and Enterprise Edition 6.13.0. Both editions feature component upgrades and resolutions to notable issues such as: not being able to delete system properties via the Admin Console; an HTTP/2 warning in the log file despite HTTP/2 having been disabled; and a JDK 21 compilation error stating the "The Security Manager is deprecated and will be removed in a future release." More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for Community Edition 6.2024.5 and Enterprise Edition 6.14.0.
Open Liberty
IBM has released version 24.0.0.5-beta of Open Liberty featuring previews of updated Jakarta EE 11 specifications, namely: Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 4.1; Jakarta Concurrency 3.1; Jakarta Data 1.0; Jakarta Expression Language 6.0; Jakarta Pages 4.0; and Jakarta Servlet 6.1. This release also includes support for using InstantOn with IBM MQ messaging.
Eclipse Foundation
The release of Eclipse Store 1.3.2 ships with bug fixes and improved Spring Framework integration featuring: the removal of the @Component annotation from the EclipseStoreConfigConverter class to prevent two beans from conflicting with each other; and the addition of configuration to disable the automatic creation of default instances of the StorageFoundation interface or Storage class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Apache Software Foundation
Versions 11.0.0-M20 and 9.0.89 of Apache Tomcat both provide bug fixes and notable changes such as: a refactor of handling trailer fields to use an instance of the MimeHeaders class to store trailer fields; improved parsing of HTTP headers to use common parsing code; a more robust parsing of patterns from the ExtendedAccessLogValve class; and additional time scale options to allow timescales to apply a "time-taken" token in the AccessLogValve and ExtendedAccessLogValve classes. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 11.0.0-M20 and version 9.0.89.
Infinispan
The release of Infinispan 15.0.3.Final delivers notable changes such as: implementations of the ServerTask and ClusterExecutor interfaces should run user code in the blocking thread pool for improved control; lock Single-Instance File System directories to avoid shared usage among multiple caches mapped to the same directory; and a drop in support for OpenSSL due to the performance of the JDK implementation of TLS is now comparable with native. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and more information on the recent release of Infinispan 15.0.0 may be found in this InfoQ news story.
JobRunr
Version 7.1.1 of JobRunr, a library for background processing in Java that is distributed and backed by persistent storage, has been released to deliver notable bug fixes and enhancements such as: a SevereJobRunrException thrown from the BackgroundJobServer class due to not being able to resolve an instance of the ConcurrentJobModificationException class; the DeleteDeletedJobsPermanentlyTask class does not use correct configuration resulting in jobs declared as DELETED are not permanently deleted after the configured time period; and an improvement in database migrations. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Testcontainers for Java
The release of Testcontainers for Java 1.19.8 ships with bug fixes, improvements in documentation, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new getDatabaseName() method added to the ClickHouseContainer class to avoid an UnsupportedOperationException; eliminate the use of the non-monotonic currentTimeMillis() method in favor of the nanoTime() method defined in the Java System class as calculating a time lapse in the former may result in a negative number; and a new convenience method, getGrpcHostAddress(), added to the WeaviateContainer class to obtain the gRPC host. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
OpenXava
The release of OpenXava 7.3.1 provides bug fixes, improvements in documentation, dependency upgrades and notable new features such as: a new method, isJava21orBetter(), defined in the XSystem utility class to complement the corresponding methods to check for JDK 9 and JDK 17; and new automated tests for date, date/time and popup calendar related issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
