Weekly Links: October 22, 2020

Java

JDK 15 Sealed Classes

I said that text blocks are the most significant new feature in JDK 15. Turns out there’s another feature in JDK 15 after all: Sealed classes. A sealed class is a final class where some classes can still extend the class. We have to list these exceptions in the sealed class definition, and they must be in the same module/package as the sealed class. Yep, that ain’t gonna set the Java world on fire. And I know of hidden classes in JDK 15, but they’re even more obscure as a JVM feature.

OSGi Alliance moves to Eclipse

The OSGi Alliance put modules into Java long before Oracle did with Java 9. But unless you develop application servers, IoT solutions, or JDKs, you’ve probably never used modules in Java. If you want to split your Java applications into smaller, more manageable, and independent parts today, you run microservices in Docker containers.

Anyhow, “the OSGi Alliance no longer has the critical mass necessary to continue as a stand-alone organization”. So they dissolve and move their assets to Eclipse. I hope that OSGi moves ahead faster than Jakarta EE!

AdoptOpenJDK Reaches 200 Million Downloads

Talking about Eclipse: That’s 35 million downloads for AdoptOpenJDK in four months. No wonder that security vendor Snyk saw AdoptOpenJDK as the biggest OpenJDK distributor with an overall JDK market share of 27% back in February 2020. All other OpenJDK distributions reached a combined 33%, including Oracle’s 15%.

Why Eclipse? Because AdoptOpenJDK joined Eclipse last June as “Eclipse Adoptium”. Adoptium? Sounds like a vitamin pill to me!

Releases

Git 2.29

Everybody’s favorite source control system had its fifth major release this year. And it’s all under-the-hood stuff that we regular Git users don’t care about. We should still upgrade, though!

Node.js v15

Building my Angular front-end with webpack takes forever and barely lights up more than 2 of the 12 logical CPU cores on my Mac. I want to believe that this is the fault of Node.js 12. Will that build get faster with version 15? Probably not. Building with Angular CLI could, though.

Now more important than Node.js v15 is the fact that in a few days, Node.js v14 will be the new Node.js LTS version. And that’s the version that most people run. Just like the Android version from three years ago…