We are pleased to announce the next alpha release of Camunda Automation Runtime 7.21. This release features the following improvements:
- Spring Boot 3.2 Support
- External Tasks can be prioritized by their Creation Date
- Java External Task Client Apache 5 update
- Configurable Apache HTTP client in the Java External Task Client
- Improved process definition search in Cockpit
- Docker start: extended
WAIT_FOR - 8 Bug Fixes
You can Download Camunda for free or Run it with Docker.
For a complete list of all improvements, take a look at the release notes. Please also see the list of known issues.
If you want to dig in deeper, you can find the source code on GitHub.
Spring Boot 3.2 Support
Coming up with this release, Camunda spring-boot-starter is compatible with Spring Boot 3.2 release. In addition, Camunda Run distribution will be shipped using Spring Boot 3.2 as well, enabling our users to integrate Camunda 7 with the latest flavor of the Spring Boot ecosystem.
External Tasks can be prioritized by their Creation Date
The FetchAndLock API has been enriched with the capacity to sort the external tasks according to their creation date. The new capability is supported via all standard integrations such as the Java API, REST API, Java Client or the respective JS Client.
Furthermore, multi-level sorting can be performed combining priority and createTime as sorting criteria. On External Tasks priority equality, the user will be able to specify the fetching order (ascending or descending) that results should be returned from the FetchAndLock API.
Java External Task Client Apache 5 update
We have updated the internal Apache HttpClient in our Java External Task Client from version 4.5.x to the more recent version 5.3. Version 5 is the latest major version of HttpClient, and it offers many new features including the support for the latest HTTP/2 standards.
Our client is now fully updated to the HttpClient 5 classic (synchronous) API and is not compatible with version 4 anymore! Make sure to read our migration guide about this update.
Big thanks to jagtstronaut and yachtintheband for contributing to this feature! 
Configurable Apache HTTP client in the Java External Task Client
A new builder method has been introduced in the Java External Task Client, that gives access to the internal Apache HTTP Client, thus letting developers even further customize the client.
This method is the customizeHttpClient and it accepts a Java Consumer that is called with the internal Apache HttpClientBuilder parameter. This example shows how you can use this method to set custom response timeouts for instance:
ExternalTaskClient client = ExternalTaskClient.create()
.baseUrl("http://localhost:8080/engine-rest")
.customizeHttpClient(httpClientBuilder -> {
httpClientBuilder.setDefaultRequestConfig(RequestConfig.custom()
.setResponseTimeout(Timeout.ofSeconds(15))
.build());
}).build();
Improved process definition search in Cockpit
The Cockpit/Processes’s page Process Definition search component allows for name and key search with equals and like operators.
With this recent change, per customer feedback, we modified the search component to use the like operator by default and the like operators are now also case-insensitive.
This allows a better experience when looking for process definitions:
Read more about this change in our migration guide.
Docker start: extended WAIT_FOR
When starting a Camunda docker container, you can specify a service host:port to wait for an available database. In case of active/passive database setup, with this alpha release, the WAIT_FOR parameter supports a list of host-port pairs to specify all nodes in the database setup. Example:
docker run -d --name camunda -p 8080:8080 --link postgresql:db \
…
-e WAIT_FOR="host1:port1,host2:port2" \
camunda/camunda-bpm-platform:7.21.0-alpha3
During start, the container will wait until it finds the first available database (or a message is thrown that none is available). Check more about the docker environment parameters here.
Thanks to @nesies for bringing the use case to us and providing the contribution for it.
Share Your Thoughts with Us!
Your feedback is really important to us, so please download Camunda Automation Platform 7.21.0-alpha3, try it out, and let us know what you think about it.
You can contact us in the forum, send a tweet to @Camunda, or file a bug in our issue tracker.
