VMware this week made a Spring Boot 3.0 update for building microservices-based Java applications that is based on the latest long-term support release for the Java Standard Edition (SE) platform.
Michael Minella, senior director of software engineering at VMware, said the latest edition of the framework supports Java 17. The hope is that adding this support will encourage organizations to move from Java 8 to the latest long-term release of the platform without requiring multiple upgrades to other previously released editions of Java SE.
In addition, Spring Boot 3.0 now also natively supports a high-performance Java development kit (JDK) known as GraalVM along with version 6.0 of the Spring framework for building Java applications using OpenJDK, an open source version of Java SE that VMware made available earlier this month.
VMware added support for Micrometer and Micrometer Tracing to improve the observability of Spring applications that will increasingly include multiple microservices dependencies.
Finally, VMware also added support for Jakarta Enterprise Edition (EE) 10, an open source extension of Java SE that is being advanced under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation.
Minella said support for Java 17 coupled with GraalVM provides a stable foundation for building Java applications that are significantly faster than applications that rely on Java 8—still the most widely used edition of the platform. DevOps teams should begin to adopt a new standard for building and deploying the Java applications that still dominate enterprise IT environments, Minella said.
There is, of course, no shortage of programming languages being used to build enterprise applications. After three decades, however, Java continues to dominate, in large part because of the sheer number of developers that have Java programming skills.
It’s less clear how quickly legacy Java applications will be updated to run on Java 17 and the GraalVM. Now that Java 17 is supported in Spring Boot—the most widely used framework for building Java applications—the pace of adoption for the latest long-term release of the Java SE platform should accelerate in 2023.
In addition, Minella noted the latest edition of the Spring framework will put organizations in a better position to take advantage of forthcoming advances such as Project Loom, an OpenJDK effort to replace threads with a lighter-weight concurrency model based on fibers that are managed via the Java runtime rather than the underlying operating system.
Collectively, these and other technologies will make it less expensive to run Java applications that are significantly faster than previous generations of applications, he added.
Most DevOps teams will find themselves managing a mix of Java applications—constructed using multiple variants of the core Java SE platform—for many years to come. However, it’s probable most new Java applications will be based on Java 17. In addition, there will be efforts to modernize legacy applications based on previous iterations of Java SE. As a result, most DevOps teams working in enterprise IT environments should expect to see an increase in the overall number of Java-based projects using microservices moving through their pipelines in the months ahead.
