This week’s Java Digest for January 17, 2021 features news on JDK 17, JDK 18, JDK 19, multiple Spring releases, Payara Platform, Open Liberty 22.0.0.1 and 22.0.0.2-beta, Quarkus 2.6.3.Final , WildFly 26.0.1 and 2022, Micronaut 3.2.7 and 3.3.0-M1, Hibernate ORM 5.6.4.Final and Hibernate Search 6.1.0-CR1, Liberica JDK 17.0.2, GraalVM 22 and JReleaser 0.10.0 and 1.0 . 0-M1.

JDK 17

As part of Oracle’s critical release patch update for January 2022, release updates for JDK 17.0.2, 11.0.14, 8u321 have been provision. More details can be found in the release notes for JDK 17, JDK 11 and JDK 8.

JDK 18

In line with the JDK 18 release schedule, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, has officially declared that JDK 18 has entered Rampdown Phase Two to signal the start of a stabilization mode for the release. GA in March. Critical bugs, such as regressions or severe functionality issues, can be fixed, but must be approved through the patch request process. The final set of nine (9) features for JDK 18 will include:

Version 32 of the early access builds of JDK 18 was made available last week, with updates to version 31 that include fixes for various issues. More details can be found in the release notes.

JDK 19

Version 6 of the early access builds of JDK 19 was also made available last week, with updates to version 5 that include fixes to various issues. More details can be found in the release notes.

For JDK 18 and JDK 19, developers are encouraged to report bugs through the Java Bug Database.

spring frame

Spring was a very busy week as the team delivered many point releases and milestones for Spring Boot, Spring Batch, Spring for GraphQL, Spring Security, and Spring REST Docs.

Spring Boot 2.6.3 release provides 39 bug fixes, documentation improvements and dependency upgrades such as Spring Framework 5.3.15, Spring Data 2021.1.1, Micrometer 1.8.2, Log4j2 2.17.1 and Hibernate 5.6.4.Final.

Spring Boot 2.5.9 has been released with 32 bug fixes, documentation improvements and dependency upgrades such as Spring Framework 5.3.15, Spring Data 2021.0.8, Micrometer 1.7.8, Log4j2 2.17.1 and Reactor 2020.0.15.

Spring Boot 2.7.0-M1 release provides 111 bug fixes, documentation improvements, and dependency upgrades. New features include: Spring GraphQL support with a new starter; new actuator information terminals to display operating system and Java vendor information; and support for RabbitStreamTemplate to classify. More details can be found in the release notes.

On the road to Spring Boot 3.0, the first stage release has been made available. Spring Boot 3.0.0-M1 will require JDK 17+ and Jakarta EE 9 alignment and a new milestone release is planned every two months. More details can be found in the release notes.

Similarly, the Spring Batch 5.0-M1 release will also require JDK 17+ and alignment with Jakarta EE 9. This release also includes dependency upgrades to upcoming Spring Framework 6.0 releases. More details can be found in the changelog.

Spring’s release for GraphQL 1.0.0-M5 was mostly a follow-up to the recent M4 release. In this release, the goal was to move the Spring Boot starter from the GraphQL repository to Spring Boot.

The first major releases of Spring Security 6.0.0 and 5.7.0 have been released. Similar to Spring Framework 6.0 and Spring Boot 3.0, the GA version of Spring Security 6.0 will require JDK 17+ and will be aligned with Jakarta EE 9. Both versions come with breaking changes, new features and dependency upgrades . More details can be found in the release notes for versions 6.0.0-M1 and 5.7.0-M1.

Spring REST Docs 2.0.6.RELEASE has been released with 18 bug fixes and documentation improvements. More details can be found in the release notes.

The first major release of Spring REST Docs 3.0.0 has been released with 13 enhancements, documentation improvements, and dependency upgrades. Spring REST Docs 3.0 will also require JDK 17+ and will be aligned with Jakarta EE 9. It is important to note that support for REST Assured has been temporarily removed as it is not yet compatible with Jakarta EE 9.

Payara

Payara has released the January 2022 edition of its Payara platform as an enterprise-only version. The Payara Platform Enterprise 5.35.0 edition offers two enhancements and seven bug fixes related to the Upgrade Tool, a utility to upgrade more efficiently to new versions of Payara Platform Enterprise.

Payara also offered an enhanced version of the IntelliJ IDEA Payara Platform Tools plugin for the Community and Ultimate editions of IntelliJ IDEA.

open freedom

IBM promoted Open Liberty 22.0.0.1 from its beta release to provide: support for MicroProfile 5.0; migrate MicroProfile RestClient implementation from Apache CXF to RESTEasy; the ability to create OpenAPI documentation for multiple applications; and support for receiving tokens in JSON Web Encryption format via IBM OpenID Connect Client 1.0 and Social Media Login 1.0.

Open Liberty 22.0.0.2-beta was released to support Privacy-Enhanced Mail URL-encoded SSL certificates, as line folding in HTTP headers has been deprecated.

Quarks

Quarkus 2.6.3.Final, a maintenance release, includes: fully disabled JNDI service in Hibernate ORM extension; upgrades to HIbernate ORM and Hibernate Reactive; avoid a NullPointerException when collecting RESTEasy annotation providers on Resource Classes; and update the Yasson library to support Java 17 records. More details can be found in the changelog.

WildFly

Red Hat has released WildFly 26.0.1, a small bugfix release that includes component upgrades for WildFly Core versions 18.0.1, 18.0.2, 18.0.3 and 18.0.4, Protocol Buffers (protobuf) 3.19 .2 which addresses security vulnerability CVE-2021-22569 and Bootable JAR 7.0.0.

As a follow-up to the September 2021 Changes are Coming to WildFly blog post, Red Hat has provided its 2022 release plan to include a change from time-limited releases to feature releases for WildFly 27 and, most likely, WildFly 28 This change was necessary because it would not have been practical to support the upcoming GA version of Jakarta EE 10 in a single time-limited release. In the meantime, WildFly 26.1 and 26.1.1 are expected to release in March and April respectively.

Micronaut

The Micronaut Foundation released Micronaut 3.2.7 including: an upgrade to Netty 4.1.73.Final; a badge for Gradle Enterprise; and one jaxrs-server-security module in the Micronaut catalog.

On the road to Micronaut 3.3.0, the first stage release includes upgrades to other Micronaut projects such as Micronaut SQL Libraries, Micronaut Views, Micronaut Liquibase, Micronaut Picocli Configuration, and Micronaut Kafka.

Hibernate

Hibernate ORM 5.6.4.Final has been released with new default methods, MultiTableBulkIdStrategy and Exporter, for backwards compatibility with 5.6.1.Final.

On the road to Hibernate Search 6.1.0, the first release candidate was made available to include: dependency upgrades to Hibernate ORM 5.6.3, Elasticsearch Client 7.16.3, JBoss Logging 3.4.3.Final and SLF4J 1.7.33; better defaults and optional operators for the regexp predicate; and additional Maven artifacts compatible with Hibernate ORM 6.0.

Liberia

Along with Oracle’s critical release patch update for January 2022, BellSoft has released releases 17.0.2, 11.0.14, and 8u322 of Liberica JDK, their OpenJDK downstream distribution.

GraalVM

Oracle Labs released GraalVM 22 Enterprise Edition to provide new compiler optimizations and several enhancements to Native Image for increased peak performance, reduced memory requirements, and smaller executables.

GraalVM 22 Community Edition, currently in testing, should be released soon. InfoQ plans to follow up with more detailed reporting.

JReleaser

Version 0.10.0 of JReleaser, a Java utility that streamlines the creation of project releases, has been released with breaking changes and is considered the final “push” to the planned 1.0.0 release. To this end, the first milestone version of 1.0.0 was also released last week with many new features and dependency upgrades.

InfoQ plans to follow up with more detailed news when the GA JReleaser 1.0.0 release is released.