Weekly Links: November 16, 2020

Tools

Manage Multiple JDK Installations With SDKMAN!

Between major Java releases coming every six months now and new Java distributors popping up, there’s an awful lot of Java out there now. So we switch between Java versions a lot more these days. SDKMAN! helps by providing Java releases from Oracle, AdoptOpenJDK, Amazon, Azul, BellSoft, and SAP. Once installed, you can switch easily between your Java versions.

I use SDKMAN! myself. So my .zshrc defines aliases for switching to Java 15 (alias j15='sdk use java 15.0.0.j9-adpt') or showing the current Java version (alias jv='java -version').

PowerShell 7.1

Microsoft tries hard to make Windows more developer-friendly. Windows now has a Linux sub-system. And with PowerShell, it has an open-source, cross-platform shell. PowerShell 7.1 fixes bugs and makes “quality-of-life improvements” while trying not to break anything.

Over the Fence

Angular 11 goes GA

Angular is one of the “Big Three” Single Page Application (SPA) frameworks. Unlike React or Vue, it comes with “batteries included” — all the typical features that our applications need are part of the core framework. And Angular uses Typescript, which makes Javascript tolerable for us Java folks. Version 11 is already the third release this year because version 9 got delayed from 2019. So Angular 10 was smaller in scope, as is this version 11: Fonts are inlined, reporting & logging got better, builds are faster, tests are easier. As someone who already spent many hours waiting for Angular builds to finish: I take faster build times any day!

Releases

Spring Boot 2.3.6

Now that Spring Boot 2.4 is out, 2.3.x isn’t the most current Spring Boot release anymore. But it still gets releases. Pretty quickly, if I might add — 2.3.5 got released just two weeks ago. This release has 30 bug fixes, documentation improvements, and dependency upgrades.