Weekly Links: January 25, 2021

Java

A Compendium of 2021 Java & OpenJDK Predictions

This article is chock full of surprise predictions. For instance, usage of the nearly seven-year-old version 8 is to decrease! JDK 17, the upcoming next LTS release, will ultimately become the dominant version! And Java will continue to slowly adopt features from other languages! And I thought predictions were hard — especially when they concerned the future…

JHipster

Reactive Java Microservices with Spring Boot and JHipster

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of JHipster, the Java application generator. This tutorial shows us how to do microservices with Java. And not just any microservices. No, reactive microservices! So that’s two points in buzzword bingo!

Tools

Spring Data’s Migration from Jira to GitHub Issues

From all the issue trackers I’ve used over the years, I liked Atlassian’s JIRA the most. Truth be told: I was a JIRA admin for many years. So maybe that’s just the Stockholm syndrome… Anyhow, Spring Data already has their code on GitHub. So they moved from Jira to GitHub Issues. Why? Now you don’t need two different logins anymore - one for GitHub, one for Jira. And since GitHub treats issues and pull requests equally, a pull request doesn’t need an additional issue anymore. Auto-linked references across issues, pull requests, source code, and commits, both with the Spring Data project and all other GitHub projects, are also nice. As is the ability to mention and notify any GitHub user. And what was bad? Migrating the issue contents, the markup, was the biggest pain point.

Releases

Quarkus 1.11

It’s been just seven weeks since the last, rather lackluster release. But this Quarkus release is much bigger: The new reactive REST implementation (with the great name “RESTEasy Reactive”) and new web console (“Dev UI” - available in development mode only) are the headline features. There’s also improved Micrometer support and support for Spring Data REST in the Spring Data compatibility layer. Here are the full changelogs: 1.11.0.Beta1, 1.11.0.Beta2, 1.11.0.CR1, and 1.11.0.Final.

GraalVM 21.0

We Java developers use GraalVM most to create native images for our Java applications. These native images use less memory and start faster than an applications in a JVM. With the new release, these native images can now use Java serialization. This is for those who have a legacy application that uses serialization. And for those who think JSON is too fancy and that these damn kids better get off their lawn.

GraalVM is also a virtual machine that runs other languages, like Javascript. This GraalVM feature uses the so-called Truffle framework. That Truffle framework can now also run Java itself, albeit in an early, experimental mode. Since Truffle is written in Java, Java now runs Java! That’s called " Inception". Ah, sorry, no, it’s actually called “a metacircular VM”.