Announcing Tools for Graal Development Kit for Micronaut 4.6.0

October 9, 2024 | 6 minute read
Kris Foster
Principal Product Manager
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Announcing Tools for Graal Development Kit for Micronaut 4.6.0

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.

Tools for Micronaut Framework

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.

Editor showing property without a value highlighted.

This will also be displayed as a warning within the Problems View in VS Code.

Warning message show in property view for configuration property without a value.

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.

Install the Tools for Micronaut Framework

GDK

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.

Choose GDK Cloud Platforms now contains Azure.

The support for GDK 4.6.0 is present both in our VS Code Extension as well as our IntelliJ plugin.

IntelliJ GDK New Project Wizard.

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:

  • Support for working with OCI Container Repositories (OCIR). You can add an OCI Container Repositories (OCIR) repository and see the tagged images within it.
  • Build and push to an attached container repository.
  • You can now run an image, pushed to an OCIR repository, on an OCI compute instance.

It also has some nice features for working with connected compute instances:

  • When a compute instance is added to the Oracle Cloud Assets panel you can now connect to the instance via SSH simply by clicking on the terminal icon.

Connecting to a compute instance over SSH.

Other notable features added to the Oracle Cloud Asset panel in the release are:

  • Support for using a metrics namespace within your project.
  • Support for deleting secrets in an OCI vault that you are connected to.
  • OCI policies can now be copied directly from the policy tool output generated from the panel into the OCI console policy editor. There was previously an issue in that the line breaks added to the policies in order to make them readable were copied across to the OCI console which could not handle them correctly. This is now resolved.

OCI DevOps

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.

Push Oracle Cloud Asset properties to a K8s ConfigMap using the OCI DevOps pipeline.

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.

Set the build pipeline params.

Next Steps

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

Principal Product Manager

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.

 

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