Java News Roundup: Introducing Spring AI, Spring Modulith 1.0, Testcontainers Desktop

InfoQ Homepage News Java News Roundup: Introducing Spring AI, Spring Modulith 1.0, Testcontainers Desktop

Aug 28, 2023 12 min read

by

Michael Redlich

This week's Java roundup for August 21st, 2023 features news from OpenJDK, JDK 22, JDK 21, Jakarta EE, BellSoft, Spring Modulith 1.0, Spring Boot, Spring Authorization Server, Spring Batch, Spring AI, Testcontainers, Open Liberty, Quarkus, MicroProfile Metrics and Telemetry, Micronaut, Groovy, Tomcat, Grails, JHipster Lite, Vert.x Pinot Client, Yupiik Fusion and SpringOne conference.

Ron Pressler, architect and technical lead for Project Loom at Oracle, has introduced JEP Draft 8307341, Prepare to Restrict The Use of JNI, proposes to restrict the use of the inherently unsafe Java Native Interface (JNI) in conjunction with the use of restricted methods in the Foreign Function & Memory (FFM) API that is expected to become a final feature in JDK 22. The alignment strategy, starting in JDK 22, will have the Java runtime display warnings about the use of JNI unless an FFM user enables unsafe native access on the command line. It is anticipated that in release after JDK 22, using JNI will throw exceptions instead of warnings.

Version 7.3.1 of the Regression Test Harness for the JDK, jtreg, has been released and ready for integration in the JDK that fixes a regression introduced in jtreg 7.3 that prevented correctly setting up the default environment variables on Windows. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Build 35 remains the current build in the JDK 21 early-access builds. Further details on this build may be found in the release notes.

Build 12 of the JDK 22 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 11 that include fixes to various issues. Further details on this build may be found in the release notes.

For JDK 22 and JDK 21, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.

In his weekly Hashtag Jakarta EE blog, Ivar Grimstad, Jakarta EE developer advocate at the Eclipse Foundation, has provided the voting results on the motions to add the Jakarta Data, Jakarta MVC and Jakarta NoSQL specifications to the Jakarta EE 11 Platform. Only one of these specifications, Jakarta Data, has passed.

Some comments from those who voted against or abstained from including Jakarta MVC:

This is a mature spec with some adoption at the moment, but before making this mandatory, there should be more adoption from the vendor side. As mentioned before by others, it could be added on every Profile as standalone spec, so nobody is blocked in using it right now and create more demand to add it in a future version (or give a reason for an update on the next versions Release Plan).

I encourage this work and hope it will continue forward. I look forward to eventual adoption by the platform.

I think it's an interesting addition to the platform, and we have already added it to GlassFish where it can be used out of the box. We however have several concerns. Among them is the fact that Jakarta MVC is based on Jakarta REST, while the existing MVC framework in Jakarta EE is based on Jakarta Servlet. Basing new APIs on REST makes it even more confusing which "HTTP handling API" in Jakarta EE is the core one. We'd love to see a common base being established between Jakarta Servlet and Jakarta REST first, before accepting anything into the platform that builds on Jakarta REST.

Some comments from those who voted against or abstained from including Jakarta NoSQL:

The current architectural design seems to have more frequent updates required than is planned to have for Jakarta Platform releases - this gives a strong argument to keep it outside the Platform now. Another requirement might be to have Jakarta Data and Jakarta Config added first. In general having support for NoSQL is a good idea - so this may change in the future.

It is useful and should be included in the near future. But, the specification is not ready for now, and the maturity is not clear in EE 11 timeframe.

No real feature compared to vendor API/runtime and even the opposite: you can't use your NoSQL backend without using proprietary API so misses the goal IMHO. Only gain is what can be done in 10-15LoC so not enough to justify the maintenance burden IMHO.

BellSoft has provided patch releases of their Liberica JDK 17 and 11 downstream distributions of OpenJDK that include a critical bug fix as described by JDK-8313765, Invalid CEN header (invalid zip64 extra data field size), a regression in which a ZipException is thrown when opening APK, ZIP or JAR files with several third-party tools. This issue emerged when JDK-8302483, Improved ZIP64 Extra Field Validation, provided additional validation of ZIP64 extra fields when opening a ZIP file.

BellSoft has also introduced Alpaquita Containers for Spring Boot Applications, based on Alpaquita Linux, an operating system based on Alpine Linux tailored for the Java programming language, and Liberica JDK. The former was first introduced in September 2022. Inspiration was based on the discovery that small containers with Spring Boot applications can save cloud resources.

The second milestone release of Spring Boot 3.2.0 delivers bug fixes, improvements in documentation, dependency upgrades and new features such as: use of jOOQ functionality to determine the SQL dialect; a new ThreadPoolTaskSchedulerBuilder class as a replacement for the deprecated TaskSchedulerBuilder class; and a new SimpleAsyncTaskExecutorBuilder class to build instances of the SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor class; More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Versions 3.1.3, 3.0.10 and 2.7.15 of Spring Boot all feature improvements in documentation, dependency upgrades and notable bug fixes such as: logging configuration URLs with query parameters that are not detected in XML format; an instance of the JobLauncherApplicationRunner class returning a success exit code even when no jobs have been executed; and the addition of a missing test for RabbitMQ smoke tests. Further details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 3.1.3, version 3.0.10 and version 2.7.15.

The release of Spring Modulith 1.0 features: a removal of the experimental declaration from the Scenario class; a removal of Spring Modulith Events parent POM from BOM; and upgrades to Spring Asciidoctor Backends 0.0.7 and jMolecules 2023.1.0. More details on this release may be found in the release notes. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

The release of Spring Authorization Server 1.1.2 delivers dependency upgrades and notable bug fixes such as: add length validation to prevent an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error due to invalid usercode; the demo-authorizationserver samples test suite not being executed as part of build process; and an instance of the custom form login class, DefaultErrorController, that throws a NullPointerException with a missing error message attribute. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Versions 5.1.0-M2, 5.0.3 and 4.3.9 of Spring Batch have been released that ship with bug fixes, improvements in documentation and enhancements such as: the addition of the Java ConcurrentHashMap and Date classes to the trusted list of classes in the Jackson2ExecutionContextStringSerializer class; and auto-detection of classes/interfaces to be mocked by replacing the mock(Class<T> classToMock) method with the mock() method. New features in version 5.1.0-M2 include: support for bulk inserts and new accessors in the MongoItemWriter class to facilitate extensions. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 5.1.0-M2, version 5.0.3 and version 4.3.9.

Spring AI, a "Spring-friendly API and abstractions for developing AI applications" was introduced at the SpringOne conference this past week. Developers can learn more by watching this YouTube video featuring Josh Long, Spring Developer Advocate at VMware, and Mark Pollack, Senior Staff Engineer at VMware, and this ACME Fitness Store application. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

AtomicJar, makers of Testcontainers, an "open source framework for providing throwaway, lightweight instances of databases, message brokers, web browsers, or just about anything that can run in a Docker container," has introduced a new Testcontainers Desktop application that is free to the Java community. This release includes features that allow developers to set fixed ports for improved debugging and connecting to running containers and the ability to freeze containers to prevent their shutdown while debugging. This application also allows developers to easily switch their local container runtime that eliminates the need to manipulate the testcontainers.properties file when using Testcontainers with OrbStack/Colima/Rancher Desktop or Podman. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

Testcontainers for Java 1.19.0 was also released this past week with notable changes such as: a new forListeningPort(port) convenience method in the Wait class to check on a specific port; use of the SelinuxContext.SHARED enumeration by default; and a new implementation of the ClickHouseContainer class that support the withUsername(), withPassword(), withDatabaseName() and withUrlParam() methods.

IBM has released version 23.0.0.8 of Open Liberty featuring: support for Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE) for OpenID Connect clients that prevents authorization code interception attacks; a fix for CVE-2023-38737, a vulnerability in which an attacker can send a specially-crafted request in Open Liberty versions 22.0.0.13 through 23.0.0.7 causing the server to consume memory resources and lead to a denial of service; and ensure that sufficient amount of features are installed when using the featureUtility installFeature <featurename> command that formerly didn’t guarantee the feature would work correctly.

Red Hat has released version 3.3.0 of Quarkus with notable changes such as: improvements to the OpenTelemetry extension; a new SmallRye Reactive Messaging Pulsar extension; and the ability to customize the Jackson ObjectMapper class in REST Client Reactive extension. It is important to note that, starting with this release, the .Final suffix in version names will be dropped due to the use of such versioning that is now outdated. Further details on this release may be found in the changelog.

On the road to MicroProfile 6.1, the MicroProfile Working Group has provided the first release candidate of the MicroProfile Metrics 5.1 specification featuring notable changes such as: an introduction of MicroProfile Config properties that customize how Histogram and Timer metrics track and output statistics for percentiles and histogram buckets; the @RegistryScope annotation is now a qualifier; and a new mp.metrics.defaultAppName property as a requirement for consistent tag sets that previously caused problems in multi-app application server implementations. More details on this release may be found in the changelog.

Similarly, the second release candidate of the MicroProfile Telemetry 1.1 specification has also been released featuring an dependency upgrade to OpenTelemetry Java 1.29.0; a clarification of the behavior of Span and Baggage beans when the current span or baggage changes; and an implementation of tests in such a way that is not timestamp dependent. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The Micronaut Foundation has provided Micronaut Framework 4.0.5, the fifth maintenance release with updates to modules: Micronaut Cassandra, Micronaut MicroStream, Micronaut Security, Micronaut Liquibase, Micronaut Flyway, Micronaut GCP, Micronaut AWS and Micronaut Servlet. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Version 2.0.0 of Micronaut Blueprint for JHipster was also released this past week. Based on JHipster 7.9.3, the latest stable version, this blueprint ​​generates a back-end server based on Micronaut Framework 3.10.1 for either monolith- or microservice-style JHipster applications.

The first alpha release of Apache Groovy 5.0.0 delivers many bug fixes, dependency upgrades, improvements and new features such as: a new asChecked() method in the DefaultGroovyMethods class for improved support for the checkedCollection(), checkedList(), checkedMap(), etc. defined in the Java Collections class; a new @OperatorRename annotation for improved AST transformations; and initial support for JEP 445, Unnamed Classes and Instance Main Methods (Preview). Further details on this release may be found in the changelog.

Similarly, versions 4.0.14 and 3.0.19 of Apache Groovy provide bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as support for: a null parameter in the collectEntries() method defined in the DefaultGroovyMethods class; and closure parameter type inference for tuples when static type checking. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 4.0.14 and version 3.0.19.

Lastly, the release of Apache Groovy 2.5.23 delivers two bug fixes: improved behavior of variable resolution within the Closure class; and a NoSuchMethodError thrown when executing a Groovy script. Further details on this release may be found in the changelog.

Versions 11.0.0-M11, 10.1.13, 9.0.80 and 8.5.93 of Apache Tomcat were released this past week with all four versions providing notable changes such as: a fix for CVE-2023-41080, a URL redirection to an untrusted site vulnerability in the FORM authentication feature in Apache Tomcat; and use of the provided error code during error page processing rather than assuming an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error if an application or library sets both a non-HTTP 500 Internal Server Error and the jakarta.servlet.error.exception</code> request attribute. Version 11.0.0-M11 also includes an update to the HTTP parameter handling to align with the changes in the Jakarta Servlet 6.1 API for the methods defined in the ServletRequest interface. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 11.0.0-M11, version 10.1.13, version 9.0.80 and version 8.5.93.

The Grails Foundation has introduced version 6.0.0 of the Grails Spring Security Core Plugin featuring elevated security, support for Spring Security 5.8.6, compatibility with Grails 6.0.0, an enhanced command line interface, dependency upgrades and improved navigation of documentation.

Version 0.41.0 of JHipster Lite has been released featuring bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: a replacement on the use of the Java @Generated annotation with the JHipster @ExcludeFromGeneratedCodeCoverage annotation; a removal of the password() method from the OAuth2Configuration class; and an execution of integration tests with a configuration derived from an application configuration file. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The Eclipse Vert.x team has introduced a new Pinot Client for Apache Pinot, a re­al­time distributed datastore for analytical workloads, as a replacement for the Apache Pinot Java Client. This new client exposes a convenient API for Eclipse Vert.x applications to query Apache Pinot servers.

Version 1.0.6 of Yupiik Fusion has been released with notable changes such as support for: embeddable nested tables for cases with more than 255 columns; the ability of the PartialResponse class to customize the RESPONSE_HEADERS field in the JsonRpcHandler class; and the OffsetDateTime, ZoneOffset and LocalDate as root parameters on a JSON-RPC endpoint. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The SpringOne and VMware Explore conference was held at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas, Nevada this past week featuring sessions designed for Application Developers, Platform Operators/DevOps/SREs and Application Architects. Spring Technologies included: Platforms and Tooling for Spring Applications; Spring Framework; Spring Boot; Spring Security; Spring Cloud; Spring Data/Stream; and the Spring Community.

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