A Review of Recent Narayana Releases

The last four releases of Narayana have brought some noteworthy changes, closing 86 issues in the process, which I’d like to summarise in this brief post. The contributions have come from both the broader community and the core Narayana team, thank you for that. The changes include bug fixes, dependency upgrades and tasks and features.

Community

Improve inclusiveness by building a community of users

We reviewed our existing guidance, adding clarifying text to the contributing guide and added a SECURITY.md file. The latest snapshot adds an email address for reporting security issues.

Conscious Language

We also reviewed our materials to ensure that we use welcoming language, free from offensive, othering, or otherwise problematic communication styles.

New Additions/Features

All maven modules were migrated from Java EE to Jakarta EE (which included the main narayana repo plus the quickstart, jboss-transaction-spi and performance repos).

There is now a BOM for narayana (JBTM-3735). To depend on the correct versions in your projects just include the following dependency:

      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.jboss.narayana</groupId>
        <artifactId>narayana-bom</artifactId>
        <version>latest version</version>
        <type>pom</type>
        <scope>import</scope>
      </dependency>

The new license for Narayana is Apache License 2.0, it replaces LGPL and provides consumers with more flexibility when releasing their own software products that incorporate Narayana (JBTM-3764).

Issue JBTM-3734 was resolved by a community contributor, it introduced support for JEP-444: Virtual Threads. Virtual threads “dramatically reduce the effort of writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput concurrent applications”. The change replaced many occurrences of the synchronized java keyword with ReentrantLock which in most usages, but not all, should be semantically equivalent. The change is an API breaking change so we released the update in a major version, 7.0.0.Final.

Removal of features

All modules have been migrated to Jakarta EE and Java EE is not supported.

Release 6.0.0.Final removed the transformed Jakarta maven modules (ones that ended in “-jakarta”).

The OSGi module is no longer available, please refer to the issue for the reason why this decision was made.

Quickstarts showing integration of Spring and Tomcat with Narayana have been temporarily disabled because at the time of the Jakarta migration, Tomcat and Spring had not yet added Jakarta support to their offerings. Issue JBTM-3803 was created for them to be re-enabled when Jakarta variants become available.

Long Running Actions for MicroProfile (LRA)

Release 6.0.0.Final was certified against MicroProfile LRA 2.0.

We added a Narayana specific feature to allow LRA participants to store data with the coordinator (3rd section) during the registration phase. The feature is configurable, using the MicroProfile Config approach, because some users may prefer not to entrust their business data with the coordinator.

The bug fix for JBTM-3749 facilitated the integration of LRA into WildFly, LRA support in WildFly was added with issue WFLY-14869 by Martin Stefanko, an active contributor to LRA. JBTM-3749 provided a partial fix for JBTM-3552 (Do not rely on thread locals for propagating LRA context) and it also included a doc update recommending that users explicitly set the LRA context when JAX-RS resource methods perform outgoing JAX-RS invocations.

The latest snapshot of narayana includes documentation about configuring the concurrency of the LRA coordinator start method, the details are in issue JBTM-3753.

Transaction Logging

Transaction managers log data in order to provide the Durability property of a transactions. Narayana supports a variety of persistence stores, including logging to a database which we call the JDBCStore. JBTM-3724 included a quickstart for this store and JBTM-3754 introduced an option to supply the DataSource for connecting to the store at runtime for use with the Quarkus extension for JTA transactions.

Wednesday, September 6, 2023