Upgrade Notes for Dropwizard 5.0.x

Java version changes

Jetty 12 drops support for Java versions older than Java 17. To avoid version conflicts, we’ve also adapted their Java version change and adjusted our Java baseline to Java 17.

You must upgrade to Java 17 or higher to use Dropwizard 5.0.x.

Dependency Upgrades

Dropwizard 5.0.x includes major dependency upgrades across the board. Here’s a summary of the key version changes:

Library

4.0.x Version

5.0.x Version

argparse4j

0.8.x

0.9.x

Caffeine

2.8.x

3.2.x

Guava

31.x

33.4.x-jre

Hibernate

6.1.x

6.6.x

Hibernate Validator

7.x

8.0.x

Jackson

2.15.x

2.20.x

Jersey

3.0.x

3.1.x

Jetty

11.x

12.1.x

JUnit

5.9.x

5.13.x

Liquibase

4.20.x

4.33.x

Logback

1.4.x

1.5.x

SLF4J

2.0.x

2.0.17

All Jakarta EE APIs

9.x

10.x

Jakarta component updates

Dropwizard 5.0.x will be compatible with Jakarta EE 10. Therefore all Jakarta EE dependencies have been upgraded to their new versions in the Jakarta EE 10 baseline. The API spec versions for the Jakarta EE 10 baseline can be found in the Jakarta EE 10 product requirements.

Notable changes

Virtual thread update

In Dropwizard 3.x and 4.x basic support for virtual threads was added. The implementation used virtual threads for Jetty’s internal thread pools, which is an anti-pattern. Dropwizard 5.x corrects this behavior. Now platform threads are used for the thread pools and a virtual thread executor is provided to Jetty’s AdaptiveExecutionStrategy, so that virtual threads can be utilized for task execution.

Jackson 2.20.x upgrade

Jackson has been upgraded from 2.15.x to 2.20.x. This is a significant upgrade that includes:

  • Performance improvements and optimizations

  • Enhanced support for Java 17+ features

  • Updated databind, core, and annotations modules

  • See the Jackson release notes for detailed changes

Most applications should not require code changes, but custom serializers or deserializers may need review.

JUnit 5.13.x upgrade

JUnit has been upgraded from 5.9.x to 5.13.x. Key improvements include:

  • Better integration with modern Java versions

  • Enhanced parallel test execution

  • Improved Jupiter API features

  • Updated test engines and extensions

If your tests use JUnit 4 APIs, ensure you’ve migrated to JUnit 5 or include appropriate compatibility dependencies.

Hibernate 6.6.x upgrade

Hibernate has been upgraded from 6.1.x to 6.6.x. Notable changes include:

  • Continued improvements to the type system

  • Performance enhancements

  • Bug fixes and stability improvements

  • Enhanced Jakarta Persistence 3.1 support

For applications using Dropwizard’s Hibernate integration, most changes should be transparent. However, if you use Hibernate APIs directly, review the Hibernate migration guide.

Liquibase 4.33.x upgrade

Liquibase has been upgraded from 4.20.x to 4.33.x. This includes:

  • Enhanced change log parsing and validation

  • Improved database support and compatibility

  • Performance optimizations

  • Bug fixes and stability improvements

Review your Liquibase change logs for any deprecated features. See the Liquibase changelog for detailed information.

Jetty 12.x update

The implementation of Jetty 12 made huge changes to the Jetty core. From now on, the servlet components aren’t part of the Jetty core anymore, but can be pulled in by separate modules. This provides the possibility to use different servlet API versions with the same Jetty version. Dropwizard manages the current compatible EE components. For Dropwizard 5.0.x this is done by managing the jetty-ee10-bom which particularly manages the jetty-ee10-servlet artifact.

The most important change of Jetty 12 is the signature update of the Handler#handle(...) method from

void handle(String target, Request baseRequest, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, ServletException

to

boolean handle(Request request, Response response, Callback callback) throws Exception

The handled state isn’t set via request.setHandled(boolean) anymore but via the return value of the handle method. The other notable change is the Callback object, which should be completed or aborted if and only if the request is handled by this handler.

GZIP status codes

If invalid GZIP bytes are provided to Jetty, an HTTP response with a status code 500 is returned to the user. Dropwizard catches these errors and returns a response with a status code 400 to indicate a client error rather than a server error.

Since GZIP handling is done in a Jetty handler and not on servlet level, the implementation has to be updated to work with servlet and non-servlet use cases. If you previously manually used the ZipExceptionHandlingGzipHandler, you may now also want to register the ZipExceptionHandlingServletFilter to re-enable the status code rewriting in servlet environments.

Unix domain socket connector

Dropwizard now supports a new connector of the type unix-socket. For usage information refer to the Configuration guide on unix sockets.

Removal of the server push functionality

Jetty previously deprecated the PushCacheFilter because it was used for a deprecated HTTP feature. Jetty 12 finally removed the server push functionality. Therefore Dropwizard 5.0.x removes the configuration classes for this feature.

Removal of server.maxQueuedRequests

The configuration setting server.maxQueuedRequests has been removed without replacement.

See Jetty Threading Architecture for details.

Jersey 3.1.x update

Jersey now treats HK2 binders as providers. This changes the semantics of binders in Jersey and HK2.

Request logging

The request logging through logback-access had its quirks for some time, so Dropwizard provided a workaround for it. The new logback-access implementation for Jetty 12 provides a request wrapper that builds a HttpServletRequest from a Jetty Request only for some ‘relevant’ methods. Dropwizard provides a custom workaround which resolves the servlet context and uses the current active HttpServletRequest for request logging. This allows the use of all methods of the HttpServletRequest and should be more stable for the next servlet API updates.