A peek into upcoming version 8.0

This week, we have released an early access version of the upcoming version 8.0. In this short blog, we want to give you an overview of the functionality that will be part of this new version.

In the coming weeks, additional features might be added to this list before we do the final release.

JDK Version

• We moved the codebase to JDK 11. Java 8 is still supported for a few years but more and more projects and other tools we have integrations for, are moving forward to JDK 11. So this is a logical step for our codebase.
• Speaking of the Java version, the specific Type Handlers we have for the immutable collections added in JDK 12 are improved. You can use these handlers by adding the JDK 17 specific artefact to your project if you are compiling to JDK 17 or later of course.

Core

They are a few new features in the core of the framework.

• We have now a read-only mode so that you can have multiple processes accessing the same storage, as long as only one process makes changes and the other only access the data in read-only mode. This read-only process doesn’t receive the updates out of the box.
• There are experimental implementations of ArrayList, HashMap, and HashSet that are using a sharing mechanism. The data is stored in several lazy-loaded pieces. These allow you to store large collections without the need to worry about loading them all at once into the JVM heap.
• When using the Serializer information only, we have now the possibility to include the Type Dictionary information within the binary output. This increases its output size but makes it easier to support loading binary data from an old version of your class.

Integrations

There are also several changes related to the integrations.

• For the Spring Boot integration, we have now the possibility to define multiple Storage Managers in case you want to access multiple ‘databases’ from within one application. These can be accessed using Spring qualifiers.
• We also have created an updated version of the integration for Spring Boot 3. Besides the new artefact id for this integration, no code changes related to MicroStream and integration are required. Your project needs to be using JDK 17 or later of course as this is a requirement of Spring Boot 3.
• We also have a new integration for Quarkus available. Currently, it supports Quarkus 2.x but we keep a close eye on the progress of Quarkus 3.

Tools

We have created a tool that can update your data storage to a different channel count, to improve performance if you need this due to the popularity of your program. But it can also be used to migrate storage from one type of storage to another type. Handy if you are migrating to the cloud, for example.

Conclusion

This is just a peek into what you can expect in the next major release of MicroStream. More blogs on how to use all of these shiny new functionalities will be provided to you when we release the final artefacts.
But in the meantime, you can already play around with the Early Access 2 version and let us know what you think about it or any issue that might be slipped our attention.