With the latest release of the Graal Development Kit for Micronaut Extension Pack for VS Code there are a ton of exciting new features to try out.
There are improvements in our support for Micronaut, packaged in the Tools for Micronaut® Framework extension for VS Code. We have several important enhancements for Graal Development Kit for Micronaut (GDK) and Micronaut applications that are deployed to, and use, the Oracle cloud (OCI). And finally, there are some solid features and improvements to our OCI DevOps support.
Install the Graal Development Kit for Micronaut Extension Pack by following the link to get all of the latest features. Let's take a look at the details of what is bundled.
The first change to discuss is that when you create a new Micronaut Project within VS Code using the Micronaut Launch: Create Micronaut Project
action you will now be using version 4.6.3 of the Micronaut framework.
Next, we always have the goal in mind of reducing potential runtime errors, so we now flag up configuration properties without a value as an warning. In the screenshot below you can see that the property, datasources.hr.password
, lacks a value and so is shown underlined.
This will also be displayed as a warning within the Problems View in VS Code.
Finally, we have improved the process for installing our extensions when using the MS Java Extension Pack, Java: Create Java Project
action. If you haven't used this yet this is a new project wizard with the MS Java tooling for VS Code that lets you create new projects based on some well known frameworks, including Micronaut and GDK.
If you use the Java: Create Java Project
action it will now check, as the final step of creating a new Micronaut project, whether the Tools for Micronaut extension is already installed. If it isn't, it will ask if you want to install it, so that you can get the fully featured Micronaut experience. This is, we hope, a more direct way to ensure you have the full feature set of Micronaut tooling available to you.
The release of GDK 4.6.0 came with the addition of support for Azure. This release of the tooling supports GDK 4.6.0 and consequently, Azure, so when you create a new GDK project from within VS Code you can now select Azure as one of the cloud providers.
The support for GDK 4.6.0 is present both in our VS Code Extension as well as our IntelliJ plugin.
This release also contains a bunch of new features for the Oracle Cloud Assets panel, which was previously known as the OCI Config Tool. f you haven’t yet used this, the Oracle Cloud Assets panel is designed for working resources such as object storage buckets, vaults and databases within OCI. Using the Cloud Assets panel you can assign cloud assets to your project and sit back whilst the tools manage the application configuration for you. This has the added benefit that the tools can create any required OCI cloud policies for you. Let's break down the features released into related groups.
The release contains more support for working with container images:
It also has some nice features for working with connected compute instances:
Other notable features added to the Oracle Cloud Asset panel in the release are:
This release also sees some significant enhancements for those of you using OCI DevOps pipelines through our VS Code tooling.
The first enhancement is the time taken to redeploy an application using the DevOps service. The time required to redeploy an application has gone from 4 minutes down to 20 seconds, which is a huge improvement. It should be noted that this doesn't affect the time to create a DevOps project, the time to build, or the time to first deploy, but subsequent deploys will now be much faster.
There are also significant improvements in how we handle an application's state. If you are using the Oracle Cloud Assets panel already you will know that we can now connect your app to cloud assets (databases, object storage buckets, vaults etc.) and handle the configuration required to connect to them. With this release, we now support pushing the configuration gathered by the Oracle Cloud Assets panel into a Kubernetes Config Map within the DevOps project deployment pipeline. So you can now, with a few clicks, gather the cloud configuration, push it into the deployment pipeline and then deploy the correctly configured application.
And finally, we now support passing in values for build pipeline parameters. This means that you can customise any of the build parameters when you trigger a build. This might be useful if you want to build and then deploy a version of your application built with a specific version of the Java JDK or GraalVM.
You can get started using the tooling by heading over to our Getting Started Guide and then installing our extensions into VS Code. Be sure to also check out the release blog for GDK 4.6.0, to read about what is in the latest release of the framework.
Thanks for reading!
Micronaut® is a registered trademark of Object Computing, Inc. Use is for referential purposes and does not imply any endorsement or affiliation with any third-party product.
Kris Foster is a Product Manager for GraalVM and Graal Cloud Native. He has been working in software development for over 20 years, a large part of that work building Java applications as an independent consultant.