Java News Roundup: TornadoVM 8.0, JNoSQL, Endive, JReleaser, JBang, LangChain4j, Quarkus Almanac

Build 22 of the JDK 28 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 21 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

For JDK 28, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.

The release of TornadoVM 8.0.0 delivers their new pure-Java compiler, known as the TornadoVM Compiler (TC), that compiles Java kernels to CUDA C++, OpenCL C or Metal Shading Language. This replaces the Graal Compiler and Java-Level JVM Compiler Interface (JVMCI) that have been integral to TornadoVM for the past ten years. Developers won’t need to change their code with TC. Classes such as TaskGraph, TornadoExecutionPlan and KernelContext, and annotations such as @Parallel and @Reduce will work with TC.

TornadoVM now takes advantage of GraalVM Native Image and JEP 516, Ahead-of-Time Object Caching with Any GC, under the auspices of Project Leyden for improved startup time. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The release of Eclipse JNoSQL 1.2.0, a compatible implementation of the Jakarta NoSQL and Jakarta Data specifications, ships with notable changes such as: a new VectorTemplate interface to support vector databases; integrations of the Milvus, Qdrant, and Weaviate vector databases for vector search; and new fluent temporal query operations for working with time-series data. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The release of Endive 1.2.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for SIMD instructions, by default, in the interpreter on JDK 11+ without the need to add or configure; improvements to Redline, their experimental, ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler, for more GC-friendly native memory; and continuous improvement on the Endive Component Model, an implementation of the WebAssembly Component Model Design and Specification, to support the Endive runtime. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The release of JBang 0.143.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements and two new features: replace use of SDKMan with mise-en-place as the former does not support WindowsOS; and a new unified syntax to execute a specific version of an alias. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The release of JReleaser 1.27.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: the ability for the support for the JReleaser Tool Provider to be invoked and/or loaded using Java Modules; improved generation of the changelog when GitHub issues are linked inside commit messages; and the removal of XPath to parse POM files as there were issues when packaging JReleaser as a native image. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The formal release (along with the thirty-third beta release ) of LangChain4j 1.23.0 provides bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new OllamaDecisionModel class to support decision models running in Ollama; and a new ConfidenceCascadePlanner class as a confidence cascade decision model-based agentic pattern. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The fourth beta release of Hibernate ORM 8.0.0 delivers bug fixes and notable changes such as: the ability to directly declare the @Filter and @SQLRestriction annotations on associations with the Jakarta Persistence @ManyToOne and @OneToOne annotations that include associations mapped using join tables; and a new @GeneratorOptimizer annotation that selects a " standard optimizer for sequence or table identifier generation directly on an identifier field or getter. "

The first and third beta releases of Hibernate Reactive 5.1.0 and 5.0.0, respectively, ship with bug fixes and notable changes such as: a new platform Bill of Materials that manages the versions of Hibernate Reactive, Hibernate ORM and Vert.x SQL clients; and a version check during bootstrap to ensure that Hibernate ORM and Vert.x SQL clients on the classpath aren’t older than the minimum versions it supports. Both of these versions are compatible with Hibernate ORM 8.0.0.Beta4.

The release of JobRunr 9.0.3 provides bug fixes, documentation improvements and dependency upgrades and one new feature that updates the JobHandler class that improves the log messaging from the JobZooKeeper class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The first release candidate of Gradle 9.9.0 delivers notable changes such as: the ability for Kotlin DSL scripts to be incrementally compiled using the Kotlin Build Tools API for improved build performance; new test filters that may be applied to JUnit Platform tests that are not declared as methods; and improvements to the Problems API that provides a predefined hierarchy of problem groups from the Problems interface. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

The Quarkus team has introduced the Quarkus Almanac, a utility for developers to compare changes between two releases. These changes include configuration properties, managed dependencies, extensions, and the API of the classes in the Quarkus jars. Developers can go as far back as November 2018 when Quarkus 0.0.1 was released.

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