Java 18 and JBang - @maxandersen

Java 18 is coming out today, lets see how to use Java 18 with JBang.

Getting and Using Java 18 with JBang

You can get any major version of Java with JBang using --java option, like: jbang --java 17 myapp.java.

With Java 18 that won’t work just yet - first when https://adoptium.net/ publish their first Java 18 GA download.

Until then you can active "early access" downloads using JBANG_JDK_RELEASE=ea jbang --java 18 -c 'println("Hello World!")'

OR if you already hava a Java 18 you can just set it as the default java and JBang will use it by default.

You can also teach JBang about what JDK you want to use as Java 18, using jbang jdk install.

Imagine your are using SDKMan
and have already run sdk install java 18-open then you can run the following:

jbang jdk install 18 $(sdk home java 18-open)

Now when you use jbang --java 18 or //JAVA 18 it will use the JDK sdkman installed for you.

Some news in Java 18 ?

I won’t show all new things in Java 18, happycoders.eu does that better but here are some of the most interesting ones that JBang can show you.

Default file encoding is now UTF-8

Finally! This is something that always been a mess when dealing with both Windows and Linux based installs. Charsets and file encoding easily got messed up.

To illustrate the differences you can run this one-liner JBang with different Java versions and optimally different Operating systems:

jbang --java 18 -c 'println(String.format("Default charset %s\nfile.encoding %s\nnative.encoding %s", java.nio.charset.Charset.defaultCharset(),System.getProperty("file.encoding"),System.getProperty("native.encoding")))'

With --java 18 the result is:

Default charset UTF-8
file.encoding UTF-8
native.encoding UTF-8

but on Windows with --java 17 I get:

Default charset windows-1252
file.encoding Cp1252
native.encoding Cp1252

With -java 18 the default values are the same across all platforms. A Great help!

Simple Web Server

Java 18 with JEP 408 introduces jwebserver which can be used to serve out static pages.

This is great and something other ecosystems have had for years. Thus Java is a bit late in the game here thus I’ll just say that JBang has a similar web server that works on Java 9 and upwards:

jbang httpd@jbangdev

Still happy Java 18 now comes with it built-in.

Internet-Address Resolution SPI

This one is fun and lets you replace the way the JDK resolves the IP address of a hostname.

For it to work you need an implementation of java.net.spi.InetAddressResolverProvider
and a META-INF/services/java.net.spi.InetAddressResolverProvider file containing the class name.

A minimal implementation of such that simply returns 127.0.0.1 for any hostname is here.

You can run it using jbang j18inetresolver@jbangdev/jbang-examples fake.host and any host name you try resolve will return 127.0.0.1.

So yeah, give Java 18 a try and if it is too old for you now you can always try out Java 19:

JBANG_JDK_RELEASE=ea jbang --java 19 -c 'println("Hello World!")'

Have fun!