This week's Java roundup for April 3rd, 2023, features news from OpenJDK, JDK 21, Quarkus 3.0.0.CR2 and 2.16.6.Final, Open Liberty 23.0.0.3, Apache Camel 3.18.6, PrimeFaces 12.0.4, JHipster Lite 0.31.0, JobRunr 6.1.3, Gradle 8.1-RC3 and Devnexus 2023.

OpenJDK

JEP 430, String Templates (Preview), has been promoted from Candidate to Proposed to Target status for JDK 21. This preview JEP, under the auspices of Project Amber, proposes to enhance the Java programming language with string templates, string literals containing embedded expressions, that are interpreted at runtime where the embedded expressions are evaluated and verified. The review is expected to conclude on April 13, 2023.

Gavin Bierman, consulting member of technical staff at Oracle, has published the first draft of the joint specification change document for JEP 440, Record Patterns, and JEP 441, Pattern Matching for switch, for review by the Java community.

JDK 21

Build 17 of the JDK 21 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 16 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.

Quarkus

The second release candidate of Quarkus 3.0.0 delivers new features: a quarkusUpdate Gradle task for updating Quarkus to a new version; Dev UI 2 is now default via the /q/dev or /q/dev-ui endpoints (Dev UI 1 is accessible via the /q/dev-v1 endpoint); and a new HTTP security policy mapping between roles and permissions. More details on this release may be found in the changelog.

Quarkus 2.16.6.Final, the sixth maintenance release, provides notable changes such as: a removal of the session cookie if ID token verification has failed; allow the use of null in the REST Client request body; support for repeatable @Incoming annotations in reactive messaging; and dependency upgrades to GraphQL Java 19.4, Wildfly Elytron 1.20.3.Final and Keycloak 21.0.1. Further details on this release may be found in the changelog.

Open Liberty

IBM has released Open Liberty 23.0.0.3 featuring bug fixes and support for: JDK 20; the Jakarta EE 10 Platform, Web and Core profiles; and the core MicroProfile 6.0 specifications.

Apache Camel

The release of Apache Camel 3.18.6 delivers big fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: allow HTTP response headers with empty values to be returned to support applications that require this; improved handling of allowing or disallowing an HTTP request body; and a fix for the potential to block the Vert.x event loop if the route processing coming after the vertx-websocket consumer executes blocking operations. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

PrimeFaces

The release of PrimeFaces 12.0.4 ships with bug fixes and new features: a restoration of the getExcelPattern() and validate() methods defined in the CurrencyValidator class.

Further details on this release may be found in the list of issues.

JHipster

The JHipster team has released version 0.31.0 of JHipster Lite with many dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: a fix for generating the same customConversions beans for use in MongoDB and Redis; a fix for the Apache Kafka producer and consumer; and a removal of the Jest testing framework dependency as it was only used for the optional-typescript module. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

JobRunr

JobRunr 6.1.3 has been released to deliver a fix for the high number of calls to jobrunr_job_stats view that allows developers to disable Java Management Extensions (JMX) for the JobStats class.

Gradle

The third release candidate of Gradle 8.1 features: continued improvements to the configuration cache; support for dependency verification; improved error reporting for Groovy closures; support for Java lambdas; and support for building projects with JDK 20. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Devnexus

Devnexus 2023 was held at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, this past week featuring speakers from the Java community who delivered workshops and talks on topics such as: Jakarta EE, Java Platform, Core Java, Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure and Security.

Devnexus, hosted by the Atlanta Java Users Group (AJUG), has a history that dates back to 2004 when the conference was originally called DevCon. The Devnexus name was introduced in 2010.

Developers can learn more about Devnexus and AJUG from this Foojay.io podcast hosted by Frank Delporte, senior technical writer at Azul, who interviewed Pratik Patel, vice president of developer advocacy at Azul and AJUG president, and Vince Mayers, developer relations at Gradle and AJUG treasurer.