Upgrade Notes for Dropwizard 3.0.x

Java version changes

As already mentioned in the Upgrade notes for 2.1.x, Dropwizard 3.0.0 drops support for Java versions less than 11.

Jetty 10

The main change introduced in Dropwizard 3.0.0 is the upgrade to Jetty 10.0.x. Jetty 10.0.x is built for Java 11, therefore the Java version change was necessary.

This change comes with some migration cost. For detailed information regarding the changes introduced in Jetty 10.0.x, refer to the Jetty migration guide.

The main changes for Dropwizard are the following:

  • the addLifeCycleListener(...) method was replaced by the addEventListener(...) method

  • the SecureRequestCustomizer was changed (see SNI host checking)

  • the option to exclude specific user agents got removed from the GzipHandlerFactory

SNI host checking

Jetty 10.0.x introduces stricter SNI host checking. Therefore you may encounter problems when making requests over HTTPS.

To solve this issue, the HttpsConnectorFactory got the disableSniHostCheck configuration option, which defaults to false to enable strict security for an application. When setting it to true, the SNI host check gets disabled.

Apache HttpClient 5

The Apache HttpClient was updated to version 5.x. This version moves several classes to other packages, moves classes between HttpClient and HttpCore and changes all namespace names. The new prefixes are org.apache.hc.client5 for the client classes and org.apache.hc.core5 for the core classes.

The most functions from Dropwizard are provided as before, but some changes have to be made:

  • the normalizeUri setting is removed

  • the CredentialsProvider is replaced by the CredentialsStore

  • the ServiceUnavailableRetryStrategy is removed

  • the HttpRequestRetryHandler is replaced by the HttpRequestRetryStrategy

For more information refer to the Apache HttpClient 5.X migration guide.

Dropwizard Package Structure and JPMS

In order to properly support the Java Platform Module System (JPMS), the Java packages in modules must not overlap, or put differently, the packages may not be split into multiple modules.

Dropwizard 3.0.0 won’t enable full support for the JPMS. Instead, as a transition step, automatic modules are introduced.

See also: Java 9 Migration Guide: Split Packages

Starting with Dropwizard 3.0.0 some core classes have been moved into distinct and clearly split up packages to clean up overlapping package structure.

Affected packages:

Maven module

Old package

New package

dropwizard-core

io.dropwizard

io.dropwizard.core

dropwizard-logging

io.dropwizard.logging

io.dropwizard.logging.common

dropwizard-metrics

io.dropwizard.metrics

io.dropwizard.metrics.common

dropwizard-views

io.dropwizard.views

io.dropwizard.views.common

This means that imports of core classes such as io.dropwizard.Application have to be updated for the new package structure and refer to io.dropwizard.core.Application.

JUnit 4.x support

Support for testing with JUnit 4.x has been moved from dropwizard-testing to dropwizard-testing-junit4.

Removal of classes from dropwizard-util

Many classes from the dropwizard-util module are now obsolete, since the Java standard library provides replacements for them.

For example the Sets class provided helper methods for creating Set instances. Starting from Java 9, this can be done by using Set.of(...).

Jadira Usertype Core library

Dropwizard previously registered the types from the Jadira Usertype Core library automatically. In order to align the versions 3.0.x and 4.0.x we will drop support for this library in Dropwizard 3 because the current version of the Jadira Usertype Core library doesn’t support Hibernate 6.x, which will be used in Dropwizard 4.0.x.

If you want to continue using this library, you have to set the property jadira.usertype.autoRegisterUserTypes to true in your application’s database configuration and add a dependency on the current version of the Usertype Core library.

Logback layout conversion words

Logback allows to use specific conversion words in its PatternLayout to insert information obtained by an instance of a specific Converter.

Previously, Dropwizard has overridden the abbreviated conversion words for exceptions (ex, xEx and rEx) to apply stack trace prefixing with a ! rather than a tab.

In Dropwizard 3.x these overrides are removed and all exception conversion words work as documented in the Logback manual. To apply the stack trace prefixing, new conversion words are introduced with a prefix dw. Therefore the following new conversion words can be used:

  • dwEx, dwException and dwThrowable instead of ex, exception and throwable

  • dwXEx, dwXException and dwXThrowable instead of xEx, xException and xThrowable

  • dwREx and dwRootException instead of rEx and rootException

Those newly introduced conversion words work like the Logback ones, except that the first tab is replaced by a !.

To simplify the upgrade to Dropwizard 3.x for most users, the default Dropwizard logging layout is modified to use the new Dropwizard specific conversion words.