JHipster 6.0: Java 11 & Spring Boot 2.1

The wait is finally over!

JHipster needed just one beta and one month to go GA with version 6.0 on May 2, 2019. That was smoother than the last time: JHipster 5.0 (which had Java 8 as the minimum JDK level, Spring 5 and Spring Boot 2.0 as the tent-pole features) needed four betas and 2.5 months.

With this long-awaited release, JHipster finally supports Java 11 and includes Spring 5.1 and Spring Boot 2.1.

• Java 11 is the first long-term support (LTS) release after Java 8. AdoptOpenJDK, for instance, supports Java 11 at least until September 2022. I expect that most of us Java developers will move straight from Java 8 to Java 11. So we can do that now with JHipster! By the way, Java is still free.
• Spring 5.1 supports Java 11 and refines functional development and Kotlin.
• Spring Boot 2.1 starts up faster (Hibernate can now initialize asynchronously), uses less memory and has more metrics.

What took so long?

Java 11 was released more than seven months ago. Why did it take JHipster so long to support it? Two words: Java dependencies. JHipster has a few of them:

• Sep 21, 2018: Spring 5.1 supported Java 11 before Java 11 was even out.
• Sep 25, 2018: Java 11 is released.
• Oct 30, 2018: Spring Boot 2.1 was next in line.
• Jan 23, 2019: Spring Cloud Greenwich was the last significant Java dependency which JHipster needed.
• Feb/Mar 2019: The JHipster team pulled it all together.
• Apr 4, 2019: The first and only 6.0 beta arrives.
• May 2, 2019: JHipster 6.0 goes GA.

What is next for JHipster?

The JHipster team works on two significant features as so-called blueprints instead of putting them into the “JHipster core.” Blueprints are plug-ins that are passed in as command line parameters: jhipster ‑‑blueprint kotlin

• Kotlin is rapidly gaining popularity as a better Java. Its blueprint has reached version 0.7.0.
• Vue.js is the last one of “The Big Three JavaScript Front-End Libraries” to be included in JHipster — Angular and React already are. Its blueprint is in 1.0 beta status.

So again, what is next for JHipster? I don’t know. We have to wait for the keynote of the “JHipster Conf 2” conference on Jun 27 to find out. I’ll be at that conference!