Holon 5.2 Alpha release: what’s on the horizon

The next minor release of the Holon Platform, tagged 5.2, is on track and we are working to make it stable and complete. The 5.2 release line is focused on the following main goals:

• Technology updates and alignment to the most recent updates of the libraries with which the platform provides integration: for example Spring 5, Spring Boot 2, JAX-RS 2.1, Swagger/OpenAPI 3.
• A complete support for asynchronous and reactive programming, including integration with RxJava and Project Reactor.
• A new MongoDB Datastore, the first Datastore API implementation for the NoSQL world, with asynchronous and reactive support for data access and manipulation using the Holon Platform Property model.
• A new Vaadin Flow UI module, to use the new Vaadin 10 web applications framework with an API consistent with the current Holon Platform Vaadin 7 and 8 modules. This will allow a quite seamless migration of the web applications based on the previous Vaadin versions, created using the Holon Platform Vaadin module API.
• A better support for the JDK 9+ module system, providing automatic module names for each artifact included in the Holon Platform.
• Many API enhancements and new features, along with performance optimizations and improved API extensibility.

The official 5.2 release is expected for the end of September 2018. But in the meantime, you can download the first alpha release, named 5.2.0-alpha1, which is now available as developers preview and for testing purposes.

This alpha release only includes:

• Support for JDK 9+ module system
• Support for Spring 5.x
• Support for Spring Boot 2.x
• Support for JAX-RS 2.1

All the artifacts are available from Maven Central. You can find the complete list of changes on GitHub.

The alpha1 release of the documentation is also available.

As always, we are happy to receive any feedback or suggestion! Furthermore, we are always open to the community, so don't hesitate to open issues and pull request on GitHub. All the Holon Platform repositories have instructions on how to contribute.

Stay tuned on the blog to learn about the next 5.2 release line steps!