Java News Roundup: JEPs for JDK 21, Spring Cloud AWS 3.0, OptaPlanner to Timefold

MMS Founder
MMS Michael Redlich

Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

This week’s Java roundup for May 1st, 2023 features news from OpenJDK, JDK 21, Spring Boot 3.1.0-RC2, Spring Modulith 0.6, Spring Cloud for Amazon Web Services 3.0.0, Spring Cloud Data Flow 2.10.3, Spring Tools 4.18.2, Infinispan 14.0.9.Final, Open Liberty 23.0.0.4, Quarkus 3.0.2 and 2.16.7, Helidon 3.2.1, Apache Camel 4.0.0-M3, Arquillian 1.7.0 and OptaPlanner transitions to Timefold.

OpenJDK

JEP 448, Vector API (Sixth Incubator), has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 21. This JEP, under the auspices of Project Panama, incorporates enhancements in response to feedback from the previous five rounds of incubation: JEP 438, Vector API (Fifth Incubator), delivered in JDK 20; JEP 426, Vector API (Fourth Incubator), delivered in JDK 19; JEP 417, Vector API (Third Incubator), delivered in JDK 18; JEP 414, Vector API (Second Incubator), delivered in JDK 17; and JEP 338, Vector API (Incubator), delivered as an incubator module in JDK 16. This feature proposes to enhance the Vector API to load and store vectors to and from a MemorySegment as defined by JEP 424, Foreign Function & Memory API (Preview). The review is expected to conclude on May 9, 2023.

JEP 445, Unnamed Classes and Instance Main Methods (Preview), has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target status for JDK 21. This feature JEP, formerly known as Flexible Main Methods and Anonymous Main Classes (Preview) and Implicit Classes and Enhanced Main Methods (Preview), 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. Gavin Bierman, consulting member of technical staff at Oracle, has published the first draft of the specification document for review by the Java community. The review is expected to conclude on May 12, 2023. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

JEP 441, Pattern Matching for switch, has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 21. This JEP also finalizes this feature and incorporates enhancements in response to feedback from the previous four rounds of preview: JEP 433, Pattern Matching for switch (Fourth Preview), delivered in JDK 20; JEP 427, Pattern Matching for switch (Third Preview), delivered in JDK 19; JEP 420, Pattern Matching for switch (Second Preview), delivered in JDK 18; and JEP 406, Pattern Matching for switch (Preview), delivered in JDK 17. This feature enhances the language with pattern matching for switch expressions and statements. The review is expected to conclude on May 11, 2023. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

JEP 440, Record Patterns, has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 21. This JEP finalizes this feature and incorporates enhancements in response to feedback from the previous two rounds of preview: JEP 432, Record Patterns (Second Preview), delivered in JDK 20; and JEP 405, Record Patterns (Preview), delivered in JDK 19. This feature enhances the language with record patterns to deconstruct record values. Record patterns may be used in conjunction with type patterns to “enable a powerful, declarative, and composable form of data navigation and processing.” Type patterns were recently extended for use in switch case labels via: JEP 420, Pattern Matching for switch (Second Preview), delivered in JDK 18, and JEP 406, Pattern Matching for switch (Preview), delivered in JDK 17. The most significant change from JEP 432 removed support for record patterns appearing in the header of an enhanced for statement. The review is expected to conclude on May 11, 2023. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

JEP 439, Generational ZGC, has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 21. This JEP proposes to “improve application performance by extending the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC) to maintain separate generations for young and old objects. This will allow ZGC to collect young objects, which tend to die young, more frequently.” The review is expected to conclude on May 10, 2023. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

JEP 404, Generational Shenandoah (Experimental), has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target status for JDK 21. This JEP proposes to “enhance the Shenandoah garbage collector with generational collection capabilities to improve sustainable throughput, load-spike resilience, and memory utilization.” Compared to other garbage collectors, such as G1, CMS and Parallel, Shenandoah currently requires additional heap headroom and has a more difficult time recovering space occupied by unreachable objects. The review is expected to conclude on May 12, 2023. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

JEP 450, Compact Object Headers (Experimental), has been promoted from its JEP Draft 8294992 to Candidate status. Under the auspices of Project Lilliput, the JEP draft proposes to reduce the size of Java object headers from 96 or 128 bits to 64 bits. Project Lilliput, created by Roman Kennke, principal engineer at Amazon Web Services, marked a milestone 1 in May 2022 by achieving 64-bit headers.

Daniel Smith, Programming Language Designer at Oracle, has announced that JEP 401, formerly known as Null-Restricted Value Object Store (Preview) and Primitive Classes (Preview), has been renamed to Flattened Heap Layouts for Value Objects. Smith has provided an updated specification document for review by the Java community.

JDK 21

Build 21 of the JDK 21 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 20 that include fixes to various issues. Further details on this build may be found in the release notes.

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

Spring Framework

The second release candidate of Spring Boot 3.1.0 ships with new features such as: change the default shutdown in the DockerComposeProperties class to stop; automatically apply the TestcontainersLifecycleApplicationContextInitializer class for context tests; and the addition of Docker Compose service connection support for the SQL Server, Oracle Database, Liquibase, Flyway and Cassandra databases. There was also a deprecation of the Couchbase SSL keystore properties, spring.couchbase.env.ssl.key-store and spring.couchbase.env.ssl.key-store-password, in favor of SSL bundle support in Couchbase. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The release of Spring Modulith 0.6 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and notable new features such as: auto-configuration for MongoDB transactions if the event publication registry is used; the event publication registry now enables asynchronous processing and shutdown behavior; the @EnableScenario annotation for using the Scenario Testing API with @SpringBootTest integration tests; and support for jMolecules architecture stereotypes in the Application Module Canvas. The Spring Modulith team has also decided to elevate this project into a top-level, non-experimental Spring project. The plan is to release a 1.0-M1 version after the GA release of Spring Boot 3.1. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Version 3.0.0 of Spring Cloud for Amazon Web Services has been released with new features: compatibility with Spring Boot 3.0; built on the top of AWS SDK V2 for Java; a completely re-written SQS integration module; and a new integration of DynamoDB. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The release of Spring Cloud Data Flow 2.10.3 primarily addresses security issues in transitive dependencies such as: spring-security-oauth2-client-5.4.2; spring-expression-5.2.11; spring-webmvc-5.3.25; json-smart-2.3; and jettison-1.51. There were also dependency upgrades to Spring Boot 2.7.11 and Spring Cloud sub-projects. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Spring Tools 4.18.1 has been released featuring enhancements such as: support for navigating to a Spring property file when inspecting on an @Value annotation; support for the @ConditionalOnProperty annotation in property navigation; and early access to Eclipse 2023-06 milestone builds. The Spring Tools team anticipates version 4.19.0 to be released in late June 2023. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Infinispan

Infinispan 14.0.9.Final has been released with notable changes such as: fix the failure of Infinispan third party integration tests with JDK17; document how to monitor cross-site replication; remove the dependency Jaeger test containers; and fix the port number in the properties file. Further details on this release may be found in the changelog.

Open Liberty

IBM has released Open Liberty 23.0.0.4 featuring: container images for the ARM64 architecture along with the existing AMD64, PPC64LE and S390X architectures; and a resolution for CVE-2023-24998, a vulnerability in Apache Commons FileUpload such that an attacker can trigger a denial-of-service with malicious uploads due to the number of processed request parts is not limited.

Quarkus

Quarkus 3.0.2.Final, the second maintenance release, ships with notable changes such as: rename the server-list file to hosts in the Infinispan Dev Services guide; Dev UI2 displaying the wrong Java version; the k3s flavor name is not properly documented in the Kubernetes Dev Services guide; and RESTEasy Reactive streaming resource methods leads to NoSuchMethodException exception in native mode. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Quarkus 2.16.7.Final has also been released featuring: a fix for the algorithm comparison bug in OIDC code loading the token decryption key; a minor update to the OIDC UserInfo class throwing NullPointerException if a string or boolean property with a given name does not exist; Quarkus dev mode not working with a certain type of project directory tree when using the @ApplicationScoped annotation; and throw an exception if the OIDC client fails to acquire a token. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Helidon

Oracle has released Helidon 3.2.1 with new features such as: an enabled flag to the JpaExtension class to permit subsequent refactoring and replacement; integration changes with the MicroProfile Rest Client and Fault Tolerance specifications to handle async calls due to an issue with the default invocation context in the Weld specification; and support for different propagators with integration of Jaeger OpenTelemetry. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Apache Software Foundation

The third milestone release of Apache Camel 4.0.0 features bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: change the default Micrometer meter names to follow the Micrometer naming conventions; support for Micrometer Observation; directly use the HTTP server in the implementation of Spring Boot; and add a listener for added/removed HTTP endpoints that make it easier for runtimes, such as Spring Boot, to use platform-http with Camel and its own HTTP server. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Arquillian

Arquillian 1.7.0.Final has been released featuring: support for Jakarta Servlet 6.0; support for HTTPS in URLs injected with the @ArquillianResource annotation; and a fix for a NoClassDefFoundError exception from the LoggerFactory class when using TestNG 7.5+. More details on this release may be found in the changelog.

OptaPlanner Transitions to Timefold

OptaPlanner, an open source AI constraint solver for software developers, will transition to Timefold, a new planning optimization company created by Maarten Vandenbroucke, co-founder and CEO, and Geoffrey De Smet, co-founder and CTO. Created by De Smet while working at Red Hat as a senior principal software engineer, OptaPlanner has matured under the auspices of Red Hat by providing their own build of OptaPlanner. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

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