Weekly Links: December 28, 2020

Java

Eclipse Adoptium Projects Ready for Community Review

AdoptOpenJDK is the leading OpenJDK distributor. It joined the Eclipse Foundation in June 2020 under the new name of “Adoptium”. Yep, haven’t heard that in the wild, either. Anyhow, after six months of work, Adoptium now has three proposals ready for community review. These proposals describe how Adoptium will work at Eclipse. They carry fancy names like “AQAvit” (which sounds exactly like that Scandinavian booze) and “Temurin” (which sounds like a sleeping pill). So what’s next after the community review? The incubation phase. Be still, my beating heart! So Adoptium won’t be up & running until the end of 2021. Luckily, AdoptOpenJDK will provide updates and new versions until then.

Oracle JRE and JDK Cryptographic Roadmap

Do you understand what “add support for the x25519 and x448 named elliptic curve groups to TLS” means? Then this page is for you! Oracle documents here which cryptographic algorithms will be added to which JDK/JRE version. Just as important, we can also see when Oracle will remove cryptographic algorithms. For instance, Java SSL will remove TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on April 20, 2021. Now I feel secure!

Inside Java Podcast: Project Panama - The Foreign Linker API

Episode 9 of the “Inside Java” podcast discussed the “Foreign Memory Access API” of Project Panama. That was about how Java can access off-heap memory efficiently. This second part discusses how Project Panama will replace the good ol’ Java Native Interface (JNI) for calling into native code from Java. This is inside baseball at its finest!

Over the Fence

Ruby 3.0

The only time we hear about “Ruby on Rails” these days is when its inventor, David Heinemeier Hansson, picks another fight with Apple. Well, the “Ruby” part of “Ruby on Rails” just had the most significant release since 2.0 got out in 2013. And just as PHP 8 before, Ruby also discovered the wonders of a Just-in-time compiler. As a result, it is now three times faster than version 2.x. Ruby 3.0 also has a DSL for types called RBS. Ractor, its take on Scala actors, is available as a preview. Finally, we get non-blocking IO with the “Fiber Scheduler”. Does that ring a bell? Seriously, Ruby 3.0 looks like a cover version of “The Very Best of Java & The JVM”…

Releases

Helidon 2.2.0

Helidon is Oracle’s Spring/Spring Boot challenger. It comes in two flavors: “MP” is the imperative, “servlet version”. “SE” is the reactive version. Version 2.2.0 supports GraphQL and Micronaut Data (“Spring Data with Micronaut”). For the adventurous among us, Helidon now works with project Loom. Loom promises to replace threads — in 2022 at the earliest.