Liberty Gradle Plug-in 3.8

Version 3.8 of the Liberty Gradle Plugin is a minor release with new functionality and some minor fixes.

New functionality

• Added support for using the plugin to deploy a SpringBoot 3.0 application. The springBoot-3.0 feature was first made available in Open Liberty 23.0.0.9, but a required fix went into 23.0.0.10 related to the springBootUtility. We recommend using the 23.0.0.10 or newer runtime. See this Open Liberty blog for more information. #853
• Added support for the following features which were all introduced in Open Liberty 23.0.0.10. See this Open Liberty blog for more information.
  ** verifying feature signatures by default during the installFeature task
  ** honoring an include element location attribute that references a directory
  ** running the plugin with Java 21

Note: To use the Liberty Gradle Plugin with Java 21, a minimum of Gradle 8.4 is required. Since Gradle does not officially support Java 21 yet, there may be unknown issues. All of our automated tests are passing with Gradle 8.4 though.

Additional Fixes

The following notable fixes are also included in this release.

• Enhance error handling for tasks #851, #850
• Fixes related to libertyDevc and Podman support 427, 430, 431,
• Fix for dev mode file watching 424
• Update documentation #858 #860

See the commit log for the full set of the changes since the previous milestone release.

The Liberty Gradle Plugin 3.8 release is available on the Maven Central repository.