Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! How are you? It's September 26th, 2023, and I am in sunny Singapore for SpringOne at VMWare Explore Singapore. If you're around, don't forget to say hi!

It's gonna be a fun and busy week in Singapore, and then next week I'm off to Antwerp, Belgium, for the amazing Devoxx BE 2023. Then, I'm off to Morocco, for Devoxx MA 2023. Then, I'm off to Amsterdam for SpringOne Tour Amsterdam. If you're in any of these places, do not hesitate to reach out and say hi! I'd love to chat! And with that, we've got a ton of things to cover…

Transactional service methods are a common pattern in Spring applications. These methods trigger a state transition important to the business. This usually involves a core domain abstraction, such as an aggregate and its corresponding repository. A stereotypical example of such an arrangement might look like this:

@Service
@RequiredArgsConstructor
class OrderManagement {

  private final OrderRepository orders;

  @Transactional
  Order complete(Order order) {
     return orders.save(order.complete());
  }
}

As state transitions like these might be interesting to third parties, we might want…

The Spring Boot plugins for Maven and Gradle provide the ability to build Docker images using Cloud Native Buildpacks. By default, Spring Boot uses the CNB builders provided by the Paketo Buildpacks project.

What's Changed

The Paketo Buildpacks project has announced that Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic-based builders are no longer supported, in favor of Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy-based builders. See the Paketo announcement for more details on the builders that are affected by this change.

The Maven and Gradle plugins for Spring Boot versions 3.1 and earlier use the Bionic Base Builder by default when building…

Hi, Spring fans! Java 21 is out and in order to celebrate, I talk to Java community legend Sharat Chander.

Hi, Spring fans!

Get the bits

Before we get started, do something for me quickly. If you haven’t already, go install SKDMAN.

Then run:

sdk install java 21-graalce && sdk default java 21-graalce

There you have it. You now have Java 21 and graalvm supporting Java 21 on your machine, ready to go. Java 21 is, in my estimation, the most critical release of Java, perhaps ever, in that it implies a whole new world of opportunities for people using Java. It brings a slew of nice APIs and additions, like pattern matching, culminating years of features slowly and steadily adding to the platform. But…

Hi, Spring fans! Java 21 and GraalVM supporting Java 21 are at long last here! It's been a long time in coming, but Java 21 - which comes out later today on the 19th of September, 2023 - brings with it some of the most exciting new features of any Java release. In this video, I (https://www.youtube.com/@coffeesoftware) will look at some of the foundational features from Java 17 and see how they culminate in Java 21. I'll look at the biggest features - virtual threads and pattern matching. I'll also look at some of the quality-of-life features that you might not otherwise notice, but that are…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring - Java 21 edition!

The big news, indeed, the biggest news, is that Java 21 is now available here! You should use SDKMAN to install it, like this: sdk install java 21-graalce && sdk default java 21-graalce. This install givews you both the new Java 21 OpenJDK distribution and the new GraalVM native image support for Java 21. It works just fine with existing versions of Spring Boot, but the real payoff will be with Spring Boot 3.2, where you'll be able to plug in virtual threads with nary but a flick of a property: spring.threads.virtual.enabled=true. Spring Boot 3.…

Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! How are you this fine 12th of September? I'm doing alright, elated, even. I've just returned from beautiful Oslo, Norway, and I've got a busy 30 days or so ahead, starting today. I'm visiting Seattle, WA; Mexico City, Mexico; Dallas, TX; Singapore (SpringOne Singapore); Antwerp, Belgium (Devoxx BE!); London, United Kingdom; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and (maybe) parts of Germany. Keep an eye on my socials and videos for details as those dates and duties become clearer. Anyway, we've got a ton to look into this week, so…

This has been a very long time in coming, but finally we can create GraalVM native images that use Spring Boot (via Spring Boot 3.2) and Java 21's virtual threads (Project Loom)!

Why does all this matter? Each of these individual things, Project Loom, and GraalVM native images, offer compelling runtime characteristics. I've waited so very long for these to converge! Let's talk about them each in turn.

GraalVM Native Images

GraalVM is an OpenJDk distribution that provides some extra utilities, including a utility called native-image that does ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation on your code. We're…