This week's Java roundup for August 5th, 2024, features news highlighting: the first release candidates of JDK 23 and Gradle 8.10; JEP 483, Ahead-of-Time Class Loading & Linking, a new HotSpot feature; the releases of Hibernate ORM 6.6, Hibernate Search 7.2, Hibernate Reactive 2.4; multiple Apache Tomcat point and milestone releases; and GlassFish 8.0.0-M7.
OpenJDK
JEP 483, Ahead-of-Time Class Loading & Linking, has been promoted from its JEP Draft 8315737 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes to "improve startup time by making the classes of an application instantly available, in a loaded and linked state, when the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine starts." This may be achieved by monitoring the application during one run and storing the loaded and linked forms of all classes in a cache for use in subsequent runs. This feature will lay a foundation for future improvements to both startup and warmup time.
JDK 23
Build 36 of the JDK 23 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 35 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes, and details on the new JDK 23 features may be found in this InfoQ news story.
As per the JDK 23 release schedule, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, formally declared that JDK 23 has entered its first release candidate as there are no unresolved P1 bugs in Build 36. The anticipated GA release is scheduled for September 17, 2024. The final set of 12 features for the GA release in September 2024 will include:
- JEP 455: Primitive Types in Patterns, instanceof, and switch (Preview)
- JEP 466: Class-File API (Second Preview)
- JEP 467: Markdown Documentation Comments
- JEP 469: Vector API (Eighth Incubator)
- JEP 471: Deprecate the Memory-Access Methods in sun.misc.Unsafe for Removal
- JEP 473: Stream Gatherers (Second Preview)
- JEP 474: ZGC: Generational Mode by Default
- JEP 476: Module Import Declarations (Preview)
- JEP 477: Implicitly Declared Classes and Instance Main Methods (Third Preview)
- JEP 480: Structured Concurrency (Third Preview)
- JEP 481: Scoped Values (Third Preview)
- JEP 482: Flexible Constructor Bodies (Second Preview)
More details on all of these new features may be found in this InfoQ news story.
JDK 24
Build 10 of the JDK 24 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 9 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 23 and JDK 24, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
GlassFish
GlassFish 8.0.0-M7, the seventh milestone release, delivers notable changes such as: removal of throwing an IllegalArgumentException if an instance of the BundleDescriptor class is null while executing the toString() method defined in the Application class; removal of additional references to the deprecated SecurityManager that included formatting, name changes, and removing unused method parameters; and an implementation of the Jakarta Concurrency 3.1, the latest version for the upcoming release of Jakarta EE 11. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Quarkus
Quarkus 3.13.1, the first maintenance release in the 3.13 release train, provides bug fixes, improvements in documentation and notable changes such as: support for CompletableFuture when using JsonRPC extension in the Dev UI; avoid a possible NullPointerException due to a race condition in the ApplicationLifecycleManager class during shutdown; and a resolution to a NullPointerException when using the findFirstBy methods defined in Spring Data JPA project that already return Optional<T>. Further details on this release may be found in the changelog.
Open Liberty
IBM has released version 24.0.0.8-beta of Open Liberty that introduces versionless features to simplify and streamline choosing compatible features for the MicroProfile, Jakarta EE and Java EE platforms. This is accomplished by configuring only the features at the specific versions required by an application. This composable design pattern minimizes runtime resource requirements and accelerates application startup times.
This release also provides previews of the upcoming releases of MicroProfile 7.0, scheduled to be released on or about August 22, 2024, and Jakarta EE 11, scheduled to be released in 3Q2024.
Hibernate
The release of Hibernate ORM 6.6.0.Final, preceded by the second release candidate a day earlier, delivers a complete implementation of the new Jakarta Data 1.0 specification that is: based on compile-time code generation via an annotation processor, enabling compile-time type safety; and backed by the StatelessSession interface, which has been enhanced especially to meet the needs of Jakarta Data. Other new features include: a new @ConcreteProxy annotation to replace the deprecated @Proxy and @LazyToOne annotations; and a discriminator-based inheritance for types annotated with @Embeddable.
The release of Hibernate Search 7.2.0.Final, preceded by the first release candidate two days earlier, provides improvements to the Search DSL that include: new projection types; new predicates; enhancements to the existing predicate types; query parameters; and a deprecation of the ValueConvert enumeration in favor of the ValueModel enumeration. This version upgrades to Hibernate ORM 6.6.0.Final which introduces compatibility with: OpenSearch 2.14, 2.15 and 2.16; and Elasticsearch 8.14 and 8.15.
The release of Hibernate Reactive 2.4.0.Final, also preceded by the first release candidate two days earlier, ships with notable changes such as: convert the cascadeOnLock() method, defined in the DefautlReactiveLockEventListener class, to be reactive; avoid the creation of multiple connections during schema migration; and a dependency upgrade to Hibernate ORM 6.6.0.Final. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Apache Software Foundation
Versions 11.0.0-M24, 10.1.28 and 9.0.93 of Apache Tomcat deliver bug fixes and notable changes such as: align HTTP/2 with HTTP/1.1 and recycle the container's internal request and response processing objects by default that may be can be controlled via the new discardRequestsAndResponses attribute on the HTTP/2 upgrade protocol; the addition of compatibility methods from JEP 454, Foreign Function & Memory API, that support OpenSSL, LibreSSL and BoringSSL, which all require a minimal version of JDK 22; and support for the RFC 8297, An HTTP Status Code for Indicating Hints, specification where applications can use this feature by casting the HttpServletResponse interface to the Response class and then calling the sendEarlyHints() method. Further details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 11.0.0-M24, version 10.1.28 and version 9.0.93.
Infinispan
Infinispan 15.0.7.Final, the seventh maintenance release, provides resolutions to notable issues such as: throw a more refined and descriptive exception if user properties are malformed; a NullPointerException when attempting to remove an entry with Xsite; and the consistent return of an empty array from the IntermediateCacheStream class due to a typo that did not update a copy-and-paste from the toArray() method. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Gradle
The first release candidate of Gradle 8.10 delivers resolutions to numerous issues and notable changes: improvements to the configuration cache, including a significant reduction in the cache file size and accelerated cache loading times; and Improved behavior and callback execution for the GradleLifecycle API. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.