This week's Java roundup for December 8th, 2025, features news highlighting: the release of Spring Tools 5.0; milestone releases of Spring AI and Spring Shell; the December 2025 edition of the Payara Platform; point releases of Hibernate ORM and Spock Framework; and maintenance releases of Spring Framework, Micronaut, Apache TomEE and Apache Tomcat.
JDK 26
Build 28 of the JDK 26 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 27 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 27
Build 2 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 1 that include fixes for various issues. There are no release notes at this time.
For JDK 26 and JDK 27, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
TornadoVM
The release of TornadoVM 2.1.0 ships with: a bug fix that solves a conversion error from half-float (FP 16) to float (FP 32); and an improvement that enhances the ByteArray class with support for HalfFloat operations that adds the Q8_0 matrix-vector computational routine for multiplication kernels. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The team has also released version 0.3.0 of the GPULlama3.java project, an open-source GPU-accelerated Llama 3 inference powered by TornadoVM. This release features faster FP16 and Q8 inference on NVIDIA; improved setup with the new TornadoVM SDKs; and integration with Quarkus. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Framework
The GA release of Spring Tools 5.0.0 features an alignment with the next generation of the Spring ecosystem (Spring Framework 7.0, Spring Boot 4.0, etc.) that includes support for API versioning, functional bean registration, null-safety with JSpecify and AOT generated data repositories. This release also enters the age of AI as it provides integration with Cursor and Copilot for both Visual Studio Code and Eclipse. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The second milestone release of Spring Shell 4.0.0 delivers documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: an upgrade to Spring Framework 7.0 and Spring Boot 4.0; null-safety with JSpecify; and an improved modularity that streamlines dependency management. This release also provides an enhanced command programming model that: defines the proper use of the @EnableCommand or @CommandScan annotations with Spring Boot; and as resolution to an IllegalStateException when using the @Command annotation on a component class. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The first milestone release of Spring AI 2.0.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements and new features such as: new methods, doInitializeLoop(), doBeforeCall(), and doAfterCall(), defined in the the ToolCallAdvisor class, that allow subclasses to customize behavior of the tool calling loop; and support for custom punctuation marks in the TokenTextSplitter class that allows for more flexible text segmentation for different languages and text formats. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Framework 7.0.2, the second maintenance release, provides bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a refinement of the canWrite() method, defined in the AbstractKotlinSerializationHttpMessageConverter class, that resolves an instance of the ResolvableType class, from the Class<?> valueClass parameter, when the provided one via the ResolvableType type parameter is not resolvable; and the elimination of unnecessarily creating instances of an ArrayList or processing of empty lists from within the AbstractTestContextBootstrapper class. This release will be included in the upcoming release of Spring Boot 4.0.1. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Payara
Payara has released their December 2025 edition of the Payara Platform that includes Community Edition 7.2025.2, Enterprise Edition 6.33.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.82.0. Along with bug fixes and component upgrades, new features in all three editions include: support for the retention of cached remote public keys should there be a failure on remotely fetching those keys; and initial experimental support for Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC).
The November 2025 edition of the platform featured Community Edition 6.2025.11, the last in the Payara Platform Community 6 series as community support has ended.
More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for Community Edition 7.2025.2, Enterprise Edition 6.33.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.82.0.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released version 4.10.4 of the Micronaut Framework, based on Micronaut Core 4.10.10, features bug fixes and patch updates to modules: Micronaut MCP, Micronaut Micrometer, and Micronaut Maven Plugin. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Hibernate
The GA release of Hibernate ORM 7.2.0 provides notable changes such as: a new @EmbeddedTable annotation that eliminates the need to use multiple Jakarta Persistence @AttributeOverride and/or @AssociationOverride annotations when defining an entity; and a new FindMultipleOption interface for improved loading of multiple IDs. Further details on this release may be found in the what's new page.
Apache Software Foundation
Versions 11.0.15, 10.1.50 and 9.0.113 of Apache Tomcat (announced here, here and here, respectively) all deliver notable changes such as: a new strictSNI attribute, added to the Connector class, that allows matching the configuration of the SSLHostConfig class associated with the SNI host name; and a resolution to a regression introduced in versions 11.0.11 and 9.0.109 that broke some clustering configurations. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 11.0.15, version 10.1.50 and version 9.0.113.
The release of Apache TomEE 10.1.3 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: a resolution to warnings, emanating from the openejb-core-10.1.1.jar file, related to using Java 21 with TomEE 10.1.1; the removal of transaction propagation; and the inclusion of the <dependencyManagement> section and dependencies in the BOMs to satisfy how BOMs are designed to operate. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spock Framework
After three years and seven milestones, the release of Spock Framework 2.4.0 provides bug fixes and new features such as: support for Groovy 5.0; a new @Snapshot annotation that injects an instance of the Snapshotter class into a field or parameter as an entrypoint for tests; and a new IBlockListener interface that listens to block events during the execution of a feature. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.