Breaking Changes

• The metaAnnotatedWith(..) predicate, as well as all syntax elements like classes().that().areMetaAnnotatedWith(..) or classes().should().beMetaAnnotatedWith(..), now all also count direct annotations as matching. The background is, that the typical use case always seemed to be "either directly annotated or annotated with some meta-annotated annotation", so we decided to cover this directly.
  • If your rule has metaAnnotatedWith(..).or(annotatedWith(..)) it still works, but you can now drop the annotatedWith(..) part
  • If your rule really wanted to test that the annotation is not a direct annotation, but only meta-annotated on another annotation, this can still be asserted by metaAnnotatedWith(..).and(not(annotatedWith(..))) (see #527)

Enhancements

• Classes appearing in member signatures (like field types or method return values) are now automatically resolved in import (see #530)
• Support for Java 17 (see #535)
• New API to check if a JavaAnnotation has explicitly declared a certain property, i.e. it is set in the annotation and not taken from the default value (see #499)

Lang

• Improved Javadoc and error message to better explain the difference of classes().that().implement(..) and classes().that().areAssignableTo(..)

Library

• New rule to assert no proxy bypasses, e.g. if a Spring bean internally calls an @Async method and thus bypasses the proxy (see #539)

JUnit

• We decided to rename ArchRules.in(..) to ArchTests.in(..), because ArchRules was considered confusing, if the actual behavior is to collect all @ArchTest members of the other class. ArchRules is still present (yet deprecated), so this will not break existing ArchTest suites (see #525)