The latest articles on DEV Community by Shane Shi (@shaneshi_backend). https://dev.to/shaneshi_backend https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3860384%2F52d38624-048a-4eb7-ab37-883f36cd5f2b.png https://dev.to/shaneshi_backend en Shane Shi Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:52:28 +0000 https://dev.to/shaneshi_backend/java-24-is-out-htmx-is-rising-and-the-microservices-rethink-bpp https://dev.to/shaneshi_backend/java-24-is-out-htmx-is-rising-and-the-microservices-rethink-bpp <p>**Java 24 is out — here's what to actually care about</p> <p>Java 24 dropped this week with 24 JEPs finalized. Most of it is noise for day-to-day backend work. The two things worth your attention:</p> <p><strong>Stream Gatherers</strong> (JEP 485, now final) let you write custom intermediate stream operations without the usual workarounds.</p> <p><strong>Scoped Values</strong> (JEP 487) give you a cleaner alternative to ThreadLocal in virtual-thread-heavy code.</p> <p>The verdict: if your team is on Java 21+ and using virtual threads, Scoped Values are worth evaluating now. Everything else can wait for your next upgrade cycle.</p> <h2> HTMX is showing up in Java backends — should you care? </h2> <p>A growing number of Spring Boot shops are pairing Thymeleaf with HTMX instead of reaching for React. The pitch: you keep your server-side rendering, eliminate the API layer, and ship interactive UIs without a JS build step. GitHub star count has crossed 38k.</p> <p>The honest take: this works well for internal tools and admin panels. For complex user-facing products with heavy client-side state, it gets awkward fast. Know your use case before adopting.</p> <h2> One architecture decision worth rethinking </h2> <p>Microservices made sense when teams were large and deployments were slow. In 2025, a lot of teams that went micro are quietly merging services back together. Not because microservices are wrong — but because the operational overhead only pays off past a certain team size and traffic scale most companies never reach.</p> <p>If your team is under 15 engineers and your services talk to each other more than they talk to the outside world, a modular monolith probably serves you better.</p> <h2> Tool of the week: Jobrunr </h2> <p>If you're running background jobs in Spring Boot and still using Quartz, Jobrunr is worth a look. It's a distributed background job scheduler with a built-in dashboard, retry logic, and dead-letter queue — all wired up with a single annotation. The free tier covers most production use cases.</p> <p>This was originally published in <strong>The Backend Brief</strong> — a weekly newsletter for backend engineers. No hype, just signal.</p> <p>Subscribe free: <a href="https://the-backend-brief.beehiiv.com" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://the-backend-brief.beehiiv.com</a></p> java backend microservices spring