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jPOS Next

· 3 min read
Alejandro Revilla
Alejandro Revilla
jPOS project founder

jPOS has evolved based on simple principles:

  • Latest version is always production ready
  • We don't rock the boat. All changes are backward compatible.

When Java started its new release cadence, we kept the baseline source compatibility to Java 8, while making sure jPOS was able to run on newer JDKs, but that prevented us to take advantage of new language features. There were features—like a long time waiting for multi-line Strings—that were nice to have, but one could still live without, but then there was one very interesting one for us, Project Loom (formerly fibers) that almost made it to Java 17, that we want to test at some large sites along with the TransactionManager.

Sealed classes, Records, Switch pattern matching, being prepared for JEP411 that will deprecate the Security Manager are all things we want to play with.

In addition, there are some changes we want to try in jPOS that would certainly rock the boat, related to audit logging (yes, we want to be agreegator/JSON/ELK friendly), using Strings instead of Integers in ISOMsg keys (so one doesn't have to create an arbitrary mapping on EMV related messages), Fluent APIs to create components for those that hate XML (funny, people find XML configs archaic but still love pom.xml), in-memory deployments, per-participant profiling on the TransationManager, etc.

In addition, we need to get rid of some baggage. The compat_1_5_2 module will remain available in the repo, as a reference, but it doesn't have to exist in the main tree. Some AWT/Swing based classes may go back to jPOS-EE as a module, and we may have a sibling module using JavaFX in order to see if it takes traction (JavaFX looks promising).

The CLI is up for a refactor. It's super useful to implement jPOS commands, but the API, initially very tied to JLine has proven to be kind of problematic once we added SSH support. We can do better on that side.

So... here is what we are planning to do:

  • jPOS 2.x.x series will become an LTS version with just security patches.
  • All the fun will happen in jPOS 3.x.x series, that currently has a baseline on Java 17 (but that may change if our Loom tests go well and we need it as a baseline).

For the time being, there's a next branch (already available in Github) that builds jPOS 3.0.0-SNAPSHOT.

The master branch currently has jPOS 2.1.8-SNAPSHOT but once we release 2.1.8, we'll switch next to become master (or take the opportunity to rename it to main) and use 2.1.8 as the forking point for an LTS v2 (or similar name) branch.

jpos-branch-plan