Announcing support for upgrades to Java 21 in Amazon Q Developer

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On February 14, Amazon Q Developer announced support for upgrades to Java 21. As a Java developer, I’m excited about this new capability, which will make it easier for me to keep my applications up-to-date and take advantage of the latest language features and performance improvements. In addition, the latest version of Amazon Q Developer includes improved summarization and recommendations that simplify the upgrade process and increase confidence in the results.

Amazon Q Developer is a generative AI-powered assistant that helps accelerate the modernization of enterprise applications. It can perform complex tasks like analyzing legacy code, mapping dependencies, and executing migration and modernization workflows. Amazon Q Developer frees up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in the undifferentiated heavy lifting of upgrading Java applications.

Staying current on Java versions is crucial, as each new release brings important security fixes, performance enhancements, and support for emerging frameworks and libraries. However, the effort required to manually migrate large Java codebases can be daunting. That’s where Amazon Q Developer has been invaluable. By offloading the tedious, labor-intensive parts of the upgrade process, your team can deliver important updates to users much faster while minimizing disruption.

The Benefits of Java 21

With the addition of Java 21 upgrade capabilities, Amazon Q Developer now supports upgrading applications from Java 8, 11, and 17 to Java 17 or 21. Some of the key benefits of Java 21 that I’m looking forward to include:

Virtual Threads: Virtual Threads are a new concurrency primitive introduced in Java 19 that reduce the effort of writing, maintaining, and debugging high-throughput concurrent applications. This unlocks significant performance improvements for your applications.

Improved Performance: Java 21 includes a variety of other language enhancements like Sequenced Collections, Record Patterns, and Pattern Matching that deliver tangible speed and efficiency gains.

Better Memory Management: Enhancements to the Z Garbage Collector in Java 21 result in more predictable garbage collection pauses and reduced memory footprint, leading to more stable and responsive applications.

Upgrading your team’s Java applications to Java 21 with Amazon Q Developer is a game-changer. It saves countless hours of manual effort that would otherwise be required to migrate all of your Java components.

Simplifying the Upgrade Process with Amazon Q Developer

Upgrading Java applications to Java 21 with Amazon Q Developer is easy. After configuring your project and ensuring it meets the prerequisites, you can simply invoke the /transform command in the Amazon Q Developer chat window of your integrated development environment (IDE). The following screenshot is from VS Code; however, Q Developer also supports JetBrain’s IDEs including IntelliJ IDEA and the qct command line.

Amazon Q Developer will then analyze your codebase, determine the necessary changes to upgrade to Java 21, and provide a detailed diff so you can review and accept the transformations. This not only saves you time, but also helps ensure a consistent, high-quality upgrade across all of your Java applications.

In addition to adding support for upgrading to Java 21, the latest version of Amazon Q Developer also enhances the summarization and recommendations it provides after completing the transformation. Once the upgrade to Java 21 is complete, Q Developer generates a detailed summary of the changes made, such as deprecated APIs removed and code refactored to leverage new Java features. It also includes tailored recommendations to further improve the application, taking advantage of the capabilities introduced in Java 21. For example, Q Developer suggested upgrading the logging framework and implementing pattern matching to make the code more concise. These summary and recommendation capabilities help ensure a smooth and comprehensive upgrade process.

Finally, Q includes recommendations to further improve the application beyond the upgrade to Java 21. For example, Q provided the following recommendations.

The summary and recommendation capabilities help ensure a smooth and comprehensive upgrade experience. Developers can review the detailed changes, understand the rationale behind them, and then selectively apply the suggested optimizations to fully unlock the benefits of Java 21. This level of transparency and guidance from Q Developer greatly simplifies the upgrade process and increases confidence in the resulting codebase.

Conclusion

In summary, the new Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for upgrades to Java 21 offload the labor-intensive task of keeping your Java applications up-to-date. The detailed summaries and tailored recommendations provided by Q Developer ensure a smooth and comprehensive upgrade process, and significantly streamline the upgrade process. I’m excited to start rolling this out and freeing up the team’s time to focus on higher-value work. If you’re a fellow Java developer, I’d highly encourage you to try out Amazon Q Developer for yourself. To get started, visit the Amazon Q Developer getting started page.