Concurrency 3.0 for Jakarta EE 10 in Open Liberty 22.0.0.3-beta

Ryan Storey on Feb 17, 2022

announcements , release , beta , jakarta-ee ,

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Although only a few short months have passed since we announced Jakarta EE 9.1 support in Open Liberty 21.0.0.12, we’re already implementing Jakarta EE 10 features. Concurrency 3.0 marks our first Jakarta EE 10 beta feature, available in Open Liberty 22.0.0.3-beta. Concurrency 3.0 introduces a variety of new enhancements including resource definition annotations that put applications in control of defining the concurrency constraints and thread context types that the application requires, context-aware completion stages that are managed by the container, and more.

All Beta Features package

The All Beta features package for Open Liberty contains all Open Liberty beta features and GA features and functions. This means that you can now try out our in-development Open Liberty features by just adding the relevant coordinates to your build tools. If you try the beta package, let us know what you think.

The All Beta Features package includes the following beta features:

Concurrency 3.0 for Jakarta EE 10

Concurrency 3.0 for Jakarta EE 10

The Jakarta Concurrency specification enhances the set of parallel and reactive programming models available to applications, enabling tasks and completion stage actions to run with the thread context of the submitter.

Concurrency 3.0 includes the following enhancements:

Resource definition annotations that put applications in control of defining the concurrency constraints and thread context types that the application requires.
Context-aware completion stages that are managed by the container.
Asynchronous methods that are backed by context-aware completion stages.
Improvements to Triggers for customizing the scheduling of business logic according to dates and times within one’s own time zone.
Standardized integration for third-party providers of thread context.

While in beta, Open Liberty allows this Jakarta EE 10 feature to be used alongside Jakarta EE 9 features so that you can try it out with existing applications. Enable the concurrent-3.0 feature in your server.xml,

<featureManager>
    <feature>concurrent-3.0</feature>
</featureManager>

You can still configure <managedExecutorService> and other Concurrency resource types in server.xml as you did for previous versions of the feature.

However, Conurrency 3.0 gives you the ability to define those resources within application components:

import static jakarta.enterprise.concurrent.ContextServiceDefinition.ALL_REMAINING;
import static jakarta.enterprise.concurrent.ContextServiceDefinition.APPLICATION;
import static jakarta.enterprise.concurrent.ContextServiceDefinition.SECURITY;
import static jakarta.enterprise.concurrent.ContextServiceDefinition.TRANSACTION;

import jakarta.annotation.Resource;
import jakarta.enterprise.concurrent.ContextServiceDefinition;
import jakarta.enterprise.concurrent.ManagedExecutorDefinition;
import jakarta.enterprise.concurrent.ManagedExecutorService;
import jakarta.inject.Inject;
import jakarta.servlet.http.*;

import java.sql.*;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletionException;

@ContextServiceDefinition(name = "java:app/concurrent/AppContextOnly",
        propagated = APPLICATION,
        cleared = { TRANSACTION, SECURITY },
        unchanged = ALL_REMAINING)
@ManagedExecutorDefinition(name = "java:module/concurrent/MyExecutor",
        context = "java:app/concurrent/AppContextOnly",
        maxAsync = 5)
public class MyServlet extends HttpServlet {
    @Resource(name = "java:module/env/concurrent/MyExecutorRef",
              lookup = "java:module/concurrent/MyExecutor")
    ManagedExecutorService myExecutor;

    @Inject AccountsBean accounts;
    ...

With the CDI feature enabled, methods that return a CompletionStage or CompletableFuture can be designated to run asynchronously by annotating them with @Asynchronous.

import jakarta.enterprise.concurrent.Asynchronous;
import jakarta.inject.Singleton;

import java.sql.*;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletableFuture;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletionException;

import javax.naming.InitialContext;
import javax.naming.NamingException;
import javax.sql.DataSource;

@Singleton
public class AccountsBean {

    @Asynchronous(executor = "java:module/concurrent/MyExecutor")
    CompletableFuture<List<Account>> findOverdue(int minDaysLate) {
        List<Account> overdueAccounts = new ArrayList<Account>();
        try {
            // Resource reference lookup requires context of the application component,
            DataSource db = InitialContext.doLookup("java:comp/env/jdbc/account-db-ref");
            ...
            return Asynchronous.Result.complete(overdueAccounts);
        } catch (NamingException | SQLException x) {
            throw new CompletionException(x);
        }
    }

    ...

When the application invokes the asynchronous method, the container intercepts the invocation and hands back a completion stage representing its eventual completion, which is arranged by the ManagedExecutorService.

    public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse res) {
        ...
        accounts.findOverdue(60).thenAccept(this::sendReminder);
        ...
    }

    void sendReminder(List<Account> overdue) {
        try {
            // Resource reference lookup requires context of the application component,
            DataSource db = InitialContext.doLookup("java:comp/env/jdbc/customer-db-ref");
            ...
        } catch (NamingException | SQLException x) {
            throw new CompletionException(x);
        }
    }

The Concurrency 3.0 specification hasn’t been published yet because Jakarta EE 10 is still under development. However, you can preview a draft of it at the concurrency-api GitHub page.

Similarly, the API jar will not be available on Maven until the specification is released, but in the meantime, you can check out the draft copy.

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>ibmdhe</id>
            <name>IBM_DHE File Server</name>
            <url>https://public.dhe.ibm.com/ibmdl/export/pub/software/olrepo</url>
        </repository>
    </repositories>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>io.openliberty.jakarta.enterprise.concurrent</groupId>
            <artifactId>jakarta.enterprise.concurrent-api</artifactId>
            <version>3.0.0.20220120</version>
        </dependency>
    <dependencies>

Try it now

To try out these features, just update your build tools to pull the Open Liberty All Beta Features package instead of the main release. The beta works with Java SE 17, Java SE 11, or Java SE 8.

If you’re using Maven, here are the coordinates:

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.openliberty.beta</groupId>
  <artifactId>openliberty-runtime</artifactId>
  <version>22.0.0.3-beta</version>
  <type>pom</type>
</dependency>

Or for Gradle:

dependencies {
    libertyRuntime group: 'io.openliberty.beta', name: 'openliberty-runtime', version: '[22.0.0.3-beta,)'
}

Or take a look at our Downloads page.

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