This week's Java roundup for December 1st, 2025, features news highlighting: JDK 26 in Rampdown Phase One; the formation of the JDK 27 Expert Group; GA releases of TornadoVM 2.0 and Spring gRPC 1.0; a point release of GlassFish 7.1; the December 2025 edition of Open Liberty; the first beta release of JHipster 9.0 and the second release candidate of Hibernate Search 8.2.
JDK 26
Build 27 of the JDK 26 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 26 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
As per the JDK 26 release schedule, Mark Reinhold, chief architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, formally declared that JDK 26 has entered Rampdown Phase One. This means that the main-line source repository has been forked to the JDK stabilization repository and no additional JEPs will be added for JDK 26. Therefore, the final set of 10 features for the GA release in March 2026 will include:
- JEP 500: Prepare to Make Final Mean Final
- JEP 504: Remove the Applet API
- JEP 516: Ahead-of-Time Object Caching with Any GC
- JEP 517: HTTP/3 for the HTTP Client API
- JEP 522: G1 GC: Improve Throughput by Reducing Synchronization
- JEP 524: PEM Encodings of Cryptographic Objects (Second Preview)
- JEP 525: Structured Concurrency (Sixth Preview)
- JEP 526: Lazy Constants (Second Preview)
- JEP 529: Vector API (Eleventh Incubator)
- JEP 530: Primitive Types in Patterns, instanceof, and switch (Fourth Preview)
For JDK 26, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
JDK 27
JSR 402, Java SE 27, was approved this past week to formally announce the four-member expert group for JDK 27, namely Simon Ritter (Azul Systems), Iris Clark (Oracle), Stephan Herrmann (Eclipse Foundation) and Christoph Langer (SAP SE). Clark will serve as the specification lead. Other notable dates at this time include a public review from June through August 2026 and the GA release in September 2026.
Build 0 and Build 1 of the JDK 27 early-access builds were also made available this past week featuring updates to resolve these initial issues. There are no release notes at this time.
GlassFish
The release of GlassFish 7.1.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: an implementation of the MicroProfile 4.0 specification; support for using the <module-name>/<bean-name> syntax for the beanName element defined in the Jakarta Enterprise Beans @EJB annotation; and an improved Admin CLI that now incorporates JLine, an advanced console input for Java.
Breaking changes include: change in support from JDK 11-21 to JDK 17-25; and a redesign of the GlassFish bootstrap using JPMS.
Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
GraalVM
Oracle Labs has also released version 4.10.1.0 of the Graal Development Kit for Micronaut featuring alignment with Micronaut 4.10.1. Formerly known as Graal Cloud Native, the Graal Development Kit for Micronaut provides a curated set of Micronaut framework modules that simplify cloud application development. The release notes only cover OS-specific downloads, a list of GDK artifacts in Oracle Maven and how to remove the quarantine attribute for developers using macOS Catalina and above.
Spring Framework
The release of Spring gRPC 1.0.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation upgrades, dependency upgrades and notable changes: support for Spring Boot 4.0 and Spring Framework 7.0; a minimal JDK 17 baseline with support for JDK 25; and full null safety via JSpecify. With this release, autoconfiguration and starter dependencies have been deprecated as they will be migrated to Spring Boot 4.1.0 in Spring gRPC 1.1.0. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The release of Spring AI 1.1.1 provides bug fixes, documentation upgrades, dependency upgrades and new features such as: native integration with OpenAI Java SDK for improved type safety and API coverage; the addition of ISNULL and ISNOTNULL constants in Filter.ExpressionType enumeration class; and a new Spring Boot starter module, spring-ai-spring-boot-starters/spring-ai-starter-model-chat-memory-repository-cosmos-db, that provides auto-configuration for using Azure Cosmos DB as a chat memory repository. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
TornadoVM
The release of TornadoVM 2.0.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades, a refactoring of the infrastructure and new features such as: an implementation of Compressed Ordinary Object Pointers (COOPs) while still maintaining support for uncompressed pointers; an update of existing scripts and the addition of new scripts for building and packaging TornadoVM in the Linux, macOS and Windows environments; and support for GPU-native Int8 types on OpenCL and Parallel Thread Execution (PTX) backends. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
The December 2025 edition of Open Liberty 25.0.0.12 provides notable changes such as: the ability for developers to supply their own Base64-encoded 256-bit AES key for password encryption; improved support for FIPS 140-3, Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules, with the IBM Semeru Runtimes versions 11.0.29, 17.0.17, 21.0.9, 25.0.1 or higher; and a resolution to CVE-2025-7962, a vulnerability affecting the Jakarta Mail 2.0.2 specification (implemented by the Open Liberty javaMail-1.5, javaMail-1.6, mail-2.0 and mail-2.1 features) that allows an attacker to perform a SMTP Injection by utilizing the \r and \n UTF-8 characters to separate different messages.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released version 4.10.3 of the Micronaut Framework, based on Micronaut Core 4.10.9, features bug fixes and patch updates to modules: Micronaut Security, Micronaut Email, and Micronaut Maven Plugin. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JHipster
The first beta release of JHipster 9.0.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: a complete redesign of the JHipster generator using TypeScript for improved maintainability; a switch to Angular without ZoneJS, AKA Zoneless, by default yielding performance improvements and reduction of bundle size; and support for JDK 25 and Node.js 24. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Hibernate
The first release candidate of Hibernate Search 8.2.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: compatibility with the Hibernate ORM 7.2 release train; and a pluggable REST client for the Elasticsearch backend making it possible to switch to a different REST client as needed. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.