Announcing Coherence CE 21.12

The Coherence team at Oracle is pleased to announce the availability of Coherence Community Edition 21.12, containing many cool new features and fixes.

The work products comprising the release are:

1. Source code on GitHub;
2. Artifacts on Maven Central;
3. Docker images on Docker Hub; and
4. Updated documentation.

In the latest release we’ve introduced a major new module: Coherence Concurrent. This module provides distributed, Coherence-backed implementations of the concurrency primitives from the java.util.concurrent package, such as executors, atomics, locks, semaphores and latches. This enables work scheduling in the grid, and distributed coordination between multiple processes, using standard Java SE interfaces with Coherence-specific factory classes creating the implementations. For full detail on Coherence Concurrent, visit its documentation pages.

New performance optimization options are another major feature in Coherence CE 21.12. You can now configure Coherence to read backup copies of data instead of primary copies, which is beneficial when backup copies are closer to the client reading the data. We’ve also implemented scheduling of asynchronous backup copy creation, which improves write throughput when using asynchronous backups. Documentation on these new performance optimization options is available here.

The Topics feature in Coherence — a messaging/streaming capability — was significantly hardened in this release. Many fixes focused on performance optimization and memory efficiency within the Topics feature. In total some 50 issues were fixed in 21.12, including three serialization-related security vulnerabilities.

2021 Was Another Prolific Year!

The Coherence team at Oracle had very high output again in 2021. Here’s a list of what we released this year, enabling our users to develop and operate awesome high-scale mission-critical cloud-native microservices applications, integrating with popular projects amongst application developers:

• In February we made Patch 1 to Community Edition Release 20.12, containing a major improvement to our Portable Object Format serialization mechanism. Portable Types eliminate the need to manually code serialization methods and register types in a POF configuration file, while expanding evolvability and improving performance over the previous system of POF annotations. New plugins for Eclipse and IntelliJ accompanied Portable Types, generating POF serialization code for annotated classes.
• Micronaut integration milestone releases were made in March and May, and the 1.0 release in July. Coherence integrates closely with the Micronaut framework for microservice architectures, offering dependency injection, listeners, configuration, and support for caching, data, messaging, and session abstractions.
• The summer saw Coherence Spring integration massively expanded, with a complete overhaul, reboot, and proliferation of integration points. Coherence now supports Spring Boot, Spring Cache Abstraction, Spring Data, Spring Session, and other integration points, making it very easy for Spring users to leverage the power of Coherence.
• Coherence CE 21.06 was released in June, ushering in a new rich Repository API for practitioners of Domain-Driven Design. This API allows applications to interact with a technology-neutral API implementing patterns for data access and manipulation. Coherence’s implementation offers advanced features for executing queries and returning projections of domain object graphs. Coherence CE 21.06 also introduced Durable Events, allowing cache clients to die, come back to life, and still receive cache events that occurred while they were disconnected. Non-blocking EntryStores were also released, paving the way for Kafka integration.
• To accompany Coherence CE 21.06, version 1.1 of the Coherence VisualVM Plugin was released. This version brings valuable new features for log file analysis and cache index analysis.
• Coherence Operator for Kubernetes version 3.2 was released in July, and several smaller releases were made to the 3.1 and 3.2 versions this year. Enhancements include support for Linux/arm64, documentation on running Coherence clusters with Istio, and version upgrades to the Operator SDK and default Coherence docker image used.
• And finally we have the latest release, Coherence CE 21.12, described above.

Watch This Space!

As we start into calendar year 2022, be on the lookout for more awesome announcements in this Coherence Medium publication, to do with:

• Additional integrations of Coherence and other products;
• Powerful new interfaces for operating Coherence clusters; and
• New commercial Coherence releases containing Community Edition functionality.