ANN What's ahead for RabbitMQ Java client: 4.0 and future plans

[Michael Klishin]

Over the last few months our team has been working on RabbitMQ Java client 4.0

and decoupling the client from server releases, build toolchain, etc.

Today I'd like to share a few upcoming changes. First of all, the new client

will be distributed separately (via oss.sonatype.org and other key Maven repositories as well

as our own Bintray Maven repo). It will also have its own release schedule instead of

being released in lock step with the server. We did this for the .NET client earlier this

year and from what we see, it has been well received by the community and let

us ship non-trivial improvements (such as .NET Core compatibility) much earlier

than it would have happened had we tied it to the RabbitMQ 3.7.0 release.

We don't expect any major breaking API changes but there may be some. However, the

version bump is primarily due to the aforementioned release schedule separation.

There are significant improvements coming in the 4.0 client:

 * Metrics (using Dropwizard's Metrics library, of course)

 * JMX and other monitoring backends (thanks to the Metrics library)

 * Logging with SLF4J (hey, it only took about a decade to get there!)

 * Option to use NIO for I/O and reduce the number of I/O threads e.g. in various load testing scenarios (won't be on by default as we have 0 community feedback on how well it works)

 * Various separate bits that have been living in the Java client repository, such as the PerfTest and Tracer tools, were extracted and will be distributed separately (more on this in a separate thread)

You can take a look at the closed issues on GitHub:

https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-java-client/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+milestone%3A4.0.0

Note that we do not change our minimum required JDK version just yet: it's still JDK 6.

We will being requiring JDK 8 shortly after Spring does this with the GA release of Spring 5

(AFAIK it's scheduled for Q1-Q2 2017).

In case you are looking for someone to thank for these improvements, that someone
should be Arnaud Cogoluègnes, who did at least 90% of the work on this
major release :)

We hope to release a late milestone of this client some time this week and an RC in a couple

of weeks.

-- 

MK

Staff Software Engineer, Pivotal/RabbitMQ