This week's Java roundup for July 29th, 2024, features news highlighting: the release of Hazelcast 5.5; early-access releases for Project Loom and Project Valhalla; beta releases of Hibernate ORM 7.0 and Hibernate Validation 9.0; and point releases for Quarkus, Helidon, GlassFish, JobRunr and Testcontainers for Java.
OpenJDK
JEP 404, Generational Shenandoah (Experimental), has been updated this past week to be included in JDK 24 despite its current Candidate status. We anticipate that this JEP will soon be promoted to Proposed to Target.
Originally targeted for JDK 21, JEP 404 was officially removed from the final feature set due to the "risks identified during the review process and the lack of time available to perform the thorough review that such a large contribution of code requires." The Shenandoah team decided to "deliver the best Generational Shenandoah that they can” and target a future release.
JDK 23
Build 35 of the JDK 23 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 34 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.
JDK 24
Build 9 of the JDK 24 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 8 that include fixes for various issues. More 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.
Project Loom
Build 24-loom+3-33 of the Project Loom early-access builds was made available to the Java community this past week and is based on Build 8 of the JDK 24 early-access builds. This build improves the implementation of Java monitors (synchronized methods) for enhanced interoperability with virtual threads.
Project Valhalla
After more than 20 months since the release of the last build, Build 23-valhalla+1-90 of the Project Valhalla early-access builds was also made available and is based on an incomplete version of JDK 23. Daniel Smith, programming language designer at Oracle, has published this early-access document that describes value classes and objects in more detail. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
GlassFish
GlassFish 7.0.16, the sixteenth maintenance release, delivers bug fixes, improvements in documentation, refactoring and maintenance, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new mechanism that logs admin commands that are invoked by the Admin Console, Admin CLI or the REST admin interface; allow a resource reference in the persistence.xml file that may be changed using the resource-ref XML tag in the glassfish-web.xml file with alternative runtime descriptor or in a deployment plan during deployment; and a new button in the Admin Console header to enable/disable admin command logging. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Jakarta EE 11
In his weekly Hashtag Jakarta EE blog, Ivar Grimstad, Jakarta EE developer advocate at the Eclipse Foundation, provided an update on the upcoming release of Jakarta EE 11, writing:
Since a couple of specification projects have published service releases to fix minor issues in their API artifacts or Java Doc, a release candidate of the Jakarta EE 11 APIs incorporating these updates will be produced shortly. There will most likely be a release candidate of the specification documents as well.
The road to Jakarta EE 11 included four milestone releases with the potential for release candidates as necessary before the GA release in 3Q2024.
Hazelcast
Hazelcast has released version 5.5 of their Hazelcast Platform delivering numerous new features such as: a new vector search utilizing a Vector Collection; a Hazelcast Jet Job Placement Control that enables developers to designate, at deployment time, which cluster members an event processing pipeline can use; and dynamic configuration using the Hazelcast REST API that enables access to data structures and cluster via HTTP/HTTPS protocols. More details on this release may be found in the what’s new page.
Quarkus
The release of Quarkus 3.13 delivers new features such as: support for OpenTelemetry Metrics with a new OpenTelemetry extension; support for Kotlin suspend functions in the WebSockets Next extension; and a new @WithTestResource annotation to replace the now-deprecated @QuarkusTestResource annotation. Further details on this release may be found in the changelog.
Helidon
Helidon 4.0.11, the eleventh maintenance release, provides notable changes such as: an updated decode() method, defined in the UriEncoding class, to expose the decodeQuery() method; remove usage of the Java ConcurrentHashMap class from the LocalXAResource class to avoid thread pinning in JDK versions 22 and lower; and a move of the client protocol ID caching from the HttpClientRequest class to the WebClient interface level for proper sharing. More details on this release may be found in the changelog.
Apache Software Foundation
The release of Apache Kafka 3.8.0 ships with bug fixes, improvements and new features such as: the launch of the Docker official image for Apache Kafka; the addition of the connectSourceStoreAndTopic() method, defined in the InternalTopologyBuilder class, as a public method within the Topology class for using a source topic directly without a redundant changelog topic; and an implementation of the ConsumerInterceptor interface in the AsyncKafkaConsumer class to eliminate redundant non-null branches. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Maintaining alignment with Quarkus, the release of Camel Quarkus 3.13.0, composed of Camel 4.7.0 and Quarkus 3.13.0, provides resolutions to notable issues such as: the Camel Quarkus Syslog extension not compatible with the JDBC Driver - Oracle extension in native mode; a SQLSyntaxErrorException caused by case sensitivity in MySQL and MariaDB databases; and the Camel Caffeine Cache extension does not work in native mode when the camel.component.caffeine-cache.stats-enabled property is set to true. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Infinispan
Infinispan 14.0.30.Final, the thirtieth maintenance release, ships with dependency upgrades and resolutions to issues: a NullPointerException from the acquireKeyFromContext() method, defined in the PersistenceManagerImpl class, when an entry is not found in InvocationContext interface; and a failure to read cache files if Infinispan terminated with a force kill when used with JDK 21. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Hibernate
The first beta release of Hibernate ORM 7.0.0 features: a migration to the Jakarta Persistence 3.2 specification, the latest version targeted for Jakarta EE 11; a baseline of JDK 17; improved domain model validations; and a migration from Hibernate Commons Annotations (HCANN) to the new Hibernate Models project for low-level processing of an application domain model. More details on migrating to version 7.0 may be found in the migration guide.
Similarly, the first beta release of Hibernate Validator 9.0.0 features: a migration to the Jakarta Validation 3.1 specification, the latest version targeted for Jakarta EE 11; a baseline of JDK 17; and a new Hibernate Validator BOM providing dependency management for all of its published artifacts. Note: this first beta release is labeled as version 9.0.0.Beta2 due to testing of their new release process causing the Beta1 release to not publish correctly.
JobRunr
Version 7.2.3 of JobRunr, a library for background processing in Java that is distributed and backed by persistent storage, has been released with enhancements: the Quarkus JobRunr extension is now visible in the Quarkus extensions catalog; an update to the quarkus-extension.yaml file to promote the JobRunr extension from preview to stable; and improved readability and performance when comparing instances of the ServerZookeeper class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Testcontainers for Java
Testcontainers for Java 1.20.1 delivers bug fixes, improvements in documentation and new features/enhancements such as: support for Apache Kafka native image; a rename of the now-deprecated SA_PASSWORD environmental variable to MSSQL_SA_PASSWORD; and support for the tenant name, password and mode in the OceanBase module. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
