Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

This week’s Java roundup for February 6th, 2023 features news from OpenJDK, JDK 20, JDK 21, Open Liberty 23.0.0.1 and 23.0.0.2-beta, Helidon 3.1.1, Quarkus 2.16.2 and 3.0.0.Alpha4, Micronaut 3.8.4, Hibernate ORM 6.2, 6.1.7 and 5.6.15, Grails 5.3.0, Apache Groovy 4.0.9 and 3.0.15, Apache Camel 3.20.2, Eclipse Vert.x 4.3.8, Gradle 8.0.0-RC5, Jarviz 0.2.0, Kotlin K2 compiler and Jfokus conference.

OpenJDK

Gavin Bierman, consulting member of technical staff at Oracle, has provided the third draft specification for JEP 430, String Templates (Preview). Still in Candidate status, this latest update for JEP 430 is a substantial rewrite that more fully covers how templates are tokenized and how to deal with ambiguities and text block templates.

JDK 20

As per the JDK 20 release schedule, Mark Reinhold, chief architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, formally declared that JDK 20 has entered its first release as there are no unresolved P1 bugs in build 35.

The final set of six (6) features in JDK 20 will include:

Build 35 of the JDK 20 early-access builds was made available this past week, featuring updates from Build 34 that include fixes to various issues. More details on this build may be found in the release notes.

JDK 21

Build 9 of the JDK 21 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 8 that include fixes to various issues. Further details on this build may be found in the release notes.

For JDK 20 and JDK 21, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.

Open Liberty

IBM has released Open Liberty 23.0.0.1 featuring numerous bug fixes and a migration to the Eclipse Public License v2.0 (EPLv2) from EPLv1 to maintain compatibility with MicroProfile and Jakarta EE that require the EPLv2 license.

Open Liberty 23.0.0.2-beta has also been released featuring enhancements to InstantOn, first introduced in version 22.0.0.11-beta, that make it easier to create and deploy applications with Liberty InstantOn.

Helidon

The release of Helidon 3.1.1 delivers notable changes such as: add Helidon Metrics integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure; a new JtaConnection class that extends the ConditionallyCloseableConnection class that proxies another ordinary Connection and makes it behave as properly as possible in the presence of a global JTA transaction; and an enhancement to allow different WebSocket applications to be registered on different ports.

Quarkus

Red Hat has released Quarkus 2.16.2.Final featuring a number of bug fixes, improvements in documentation and dependency upgrades of SmallRye Config 2.13.2 and PostgreSQL 42.5.3. More details on this release may be found in the changelog.

The fourth alpha release of Quarkus 3.0.0 has also been made available to deliver significant changes such as: support for Jakarta EE 10; an Elasticsearch Java client; support for custom FlywayDB configuration, credentials and URL; allow global default cache configuration; and a new Azure Functions extension.

Micronaut

The Micronaut Foundation has released Micronaut 3.8.4 featuring bug fixes and updates to modules: Micronaut OpenAPI, Micronaut Data, Micronaut RabbitMQ, Micronaut Azure, Micronaut Micrometer and Micronaut Test. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Hibernate

Three point releases of Hibernate ORM have been released this past week:

Version 6.2 provides support for table partitioning via partition key mapping using the new @PartitionKey annotation.

Version 6.1.7.Final ships with notable bug fixes such as: an EntityNotFoundException thrown when the refresh() method defined in the EntityManager interface is called for a parent entity having a child annotated with the @Where annotation; the execution of unnecessary SQL UPDATE statements when setting a property to its current value; and an IllegalArgumentException thrown when deleting an entity having an embeddable with a collection attribute annotated with the property, orphanRemoval=true.

Version 5.6.15.Final delivers notable bug fixes such as: a missing an identifier quote on a sequence query with MariaDB; an error when Hibernate tries to retrieve information about existing sequences; and execution of unnecessary SQL update statements when setting a property to its current value.

Grails

The release of Grails 5.3.0 delivers changes such as: an update Grails Profile BOM and dependabot.yml file; and groovy @generated annotation is now emitted on all generated methods and fields so that JaCoCo coverage should only consider manually generated code when calculating coverage. This release also includes numerous dependency upgrades to include: Micronaut 3.8.3, Micronaut Spring 4.3.1, Apache Tomcat 9.0.70, Apache Ant 1.10.13, Spring Framework 5.3.24 and Spring Boot 2.7.8.

Apache Software Foundation

Apache Groovy 4.0.9 has been released featuring bug fixes, dependency upgrades and an improvement in which the parameters of the overloaded findResult() and findResults() methods defined in the DefaultGroovyMethods that don’t contain an instance of the Closure class should accept an instance of Closure.IDENTITY. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Apache Groovy 3.0.15 has also been released featuring bug fixes and a dependency upgrade to ASM 9.4. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The release of Apache Camel 3.20.2 ships with bug fixes and numerous improvements, primarily focused on the camel-jbang component, such as: the ability to run in the background; add a --watch option to the CLI to prevent restarts per call; the ability to dump logs from Camel apps; and an export to Quarkus should add resources for native compilation. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Eclipse Vert.x

In response to a number of reported bugs found in version 4.3.7, Eclipse Vert.x 4.3.8 has been released that addresses CVE-2023-24815, a vulnerability impacting Vert.x Web application serving static content on Windows with a wildcard route that discloses classpath resources. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Gradle

The third and fourth and fifth release candidates of Gradle 8.0.0 have been made available to the Java community this past week. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes of version 8.0.0-RC5, version 8.0.0-RC4 and version 8.0.0-RC3.

Jarviz

Version 0.2.0 of Jarviz, a new JAR file analyzer utility, has been released by Andres Almiray to the Java community. This new version: adds color support to standard output; adds the windows_x86_32 and linux_x86_32 binaries; displays a module descriptor; and adds reporting capabilities. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed introduction to Jarviz.

Kotlin

The compiler team over at Kotlin has announced that the frontend to the Kotlin compiler, codenamed K2, will be declared stable with the release of Kotlin 2.0. K2 has been available as a preview feature since Kotlin 1.7, but has been in active development for well over two years. Developers can expect a Kotlin 1.9 before the release of Kotlin 2.0. Further details on K2 may be found in this InfoQ news story.

Jfokus Conference

The Jfokus conference was held this past week at the Stockholm Waterfront Congress Centre in Stockholm, Sweden featuring many speakers from the Java community who presented talks on topics such as: cloud-native build tools; event-related software concepts and methodologies; Project Loom; GraphQL; in-memory computing; and test-driven design.