A busy week in the Java, DevOps and open-source ecosystems wrapped up with a string of significant announcements. Here is a structured summary of the most important stories, originally curated by JAXenter.
Microsoft Acquires AdoptOpenJDK Contributor jClarity
The headline story of the week was Microsoft’s acquisition of jClarity, a London-based company specialising in Java performance analytics and tuning. jClarity was also one of the leading contributors to the AdoptOpenJDK project, which provides free, community-built OpenJDK binaries. The acquisition signals a deeper commitment from Microsoft to the Java ecosystem — a notable shift for a company historically associated with the .NET stack. By absorbing jClarity’s team and expertise, Microsoft gains both Java performance tooling and a meaningful seat at the AdoptOpenJDK governance table.
OpenJFX to Follow Java and Migrate to GitHub
OpenJFX, the open-source JavaFX project, was at that time hosted on Mercurial. With Project Skara — the OpenJDK initiative to move Java’s own source repositories to Git and GitHub — already in progress, and with parts of the JavaFX codebase already visible on GitHub, OpenJFX project lead Kevin Rushforth opened a discussion about migrating the full OpenJFX project to GitHub as well.
The timing was made more urgent by Bitbucket’s concurrent announcement that it would be shutting down support for Mercurial repositories the following summer. For teams depending on Mercurial-hosted Java projects, this made planning a migration path more pressing.
JEP Drafts: Removing CMS Garbage Collector and Adding ZGC for macOS
Two new JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) drafts were circulating that week, both focused on garbage collection:
- Removal of the Concurrent Mark Sweep (CMS) garbage collector — CMS had been deprecated two years prior and the draft proposed completing its removal from the JDK. Teams relying on CMS would need to migrate to alternative collectors such as G1 or ZGC.
- ZGC support for macOS — The Z Garbage Collector, designed for low-latency workloads, was proposed to be made available on macOS in addition to its existing Linux support. This would give macOS-based development and testing environments access to the same low-pause GC option already available on Linux.
Both drafts represented incremental but meaningful steps in the ongoing evolution of the JDK’s garbage collection story.
Ruby on Rails 6.0 Released
After a lengthy development cycle, Ruby on Rails 6.0 shipped with a substantial set of new features and improvements. Key additions in this release included:
- Action Mailbox — routes inbound emails to controller-like mailbox classes for processing.
- Action Text — a rich-text content framework built on the Trix editor, integrated directly into Rails.
- Parallel Testing — the ability to run test suites in parallel to reduce CI build times.
- Multiple database support — built-in support for connecting to more than one database, with automatic connection switching.
Rails 6.0 also required Ruby 2.5 or higher and dropped support for several older patterns in favour of a cleaner, more modern API surface.
Git 2.23 Introduces Experimental Commands: git switch and git restore
Git 2.23 arrived with a set of new features and fixes, the most discussed being two new experimental commands intended to improve usability:
git switch— a dedicated command for switching branches, separating this concern from the overloadedgit checkoutcommand.git restore— a dedicated command for restoring working tree files, again splitting out functionality that had previously lived ingit checkout.
Both commands were marked as experimental in this release, meaning their behaviour or flags could change in future versions. The intent was to eventually make Git’s command surface more intuitive, particularly for newcomers who found the multi-purpose nature of git checkout confusing.
Road to Angular v9: 9.0.0-next.3 Improves Ivy Performance
The Angular team continued its pre-release work on Angular 9 with the 9.0.0-next.3 release. The update focused on performance improvements to the Ivy compiler and runtime — Angular’s next-generation compilation and rendering pipeline. Alongside performance gains, the release included new features, bug fixes, and one breaking change, details of which were tracked in the Angular changelog.
Ivy had been in development for several release cycles and Angular 9 was expected to make it the default compilation mode, replacing the older View Engine.
How DevOps Teams Can Migrate to the Cloud Without Sacrificing Security
Cloud migration introduces real security risks when teams move fast without adjusting their security posture. A piece by Ivan Novikov explored how DevOps practitioners can maintain velocity during cloud migrations while avoiding common security pitfalls. Key themes included shifting security left in the pipeline, using infrastructure-as-code to enforce consistent security configuration, and treating cloud permissions and IAM policies as first-class engineering concerns rather than afterthoughts.
Getting Started with Serverless: Is It Worth Your Time?
Chris Wahl shared a practical account of his experience adopting serverless technology — covering the learning curve, operational trade-offs, and whether the benefits justify the shift in mental model. Serverless functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms remove infrastructure management overhead, but introduce new challenges around cold starts, observability, vendor lock-in, and local development workflows. The piece offered a grounded counterpoint to the uncritical hype often surrounding serverless.
AIOps and Application Performance Monitoring in Serverless Environments
As serverless architectures grow, traditional monitoring approaches struggle to keep up with the ephemeral, distributed nature of function-based workloads. An interview with Matt Chotin, Senior Director of Technology Strategy at AppDynamics, examined how AIOps — applying machine learning to operations data — can help teams manage the complexity that exceeds human-scale monitoring. Chotin discussed how application performance monitoring (APM) tools need to evolve to provide meaningful observability in serverless and highly distributed environments, where correlation across thousands of short-lived invocations becomes critical.
Originally curated from JAXenter’s weekly round-up, week of 26 August 2019.