This week's Java roundup for February 16th, 2026, features news highlighting: the second release candidate of JDK 26; an update on Jakarta EE 12; the February 2026 edition of Payara Platform; a point release of Apache Camel; and maintenance releases of Hibernate Search and Quarkus.
JDK 27
Build 10 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 9 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 26
Build 35 remains the current build in the JDK 26 early-access builds. 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 its second release candidate having resolved a license issue in Build 35. The GA release, scheduled for March 17, 2026, will include this final set of 10 features:
- 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 and JDK 27, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
Jakarta EE
In his weekly Hashtag Jakarta EE blog, Ivar Grimstad, Jakarta EE Developer Advocate at the Eclipse Foundation, provided an update on Jakarta EE 12, writing:
In the minutes from last week's Jakarta EE Platform call, the content for Jakarta EE 12 Milestone 3 is outlined. All specifications are expected to update their parent
pom.xmlto the newly released EE4J Parent 2.0.0 which contains the configuration needed to be able to stage artifacts before releasing to Maven Central the same way we used to be able to do with OSSRH (which was retired last year).
Several specifications have reached a milestone 2 release for Jakarta EE 12. These include: Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 5.0; Jakarta Persistence 4.0; Jakarta Validation 4.0; Jakarta RESTful Web Services 5.0; Jakarta Query 1.0; Jakarta Data 1.1; and Jakarta NoSQL 1.1.
Spring Framework
It was a busy week over at Spring as the various teams have delivered the second milestone releases of: Spring Boot; Spring Security; Spring Integration; Spring Modulith; and Spring AMQP; along with the first milestone releases of Spring Session, Spring for Apache Kafka and Spring LDAP. Further details may be found in this InfoQ news story.
Payara
Payara has released their February 2026 edition of the Payara Platform that includes Community Edition 7.2026.2, Enterprise Edition 6.35.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.84.0. Along with bug fixes and component upgrades, all three editions deliver new features such as: improved system logging with a new property that allows specifying the system logging facility; and HTTP DELETE requests with a non-zero Content-Length header are now enabled by default.
Legacy features, such as Lifecycle Modules and Distributed Component Object Model, have been removed in Community Edition 7.2026.2 to allow for development of Enterprise Edition 7.
More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for Community Edition 7.2026.2, Enterprise Edition 6.35.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.84.0.
Hibernate
The release of Hibernate Search 8.2.2.Final ships with notable changes such as: compatibility with Hibernate ORM 7.2.4.Final; use of Locale.Root when instantiating loggers to avoid unnecessary class lookups; and a resolution to a document being updated, instead of deleted, during a cascading delete when applying an instance of the Hibernate ORM OneToOne class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Quarkus
Quarkus 3.31.4, the third maintenance release (version 3.31.0 was skipped), provides notable changes such as: a new isEmpty() method, added to the DirectoryPathTree class, to restore the mechanism that was removed in the 3.30 release train for handling empty source sets; and a resolution to a NullPointerException setting the QUARKUS_HTTP_TEST_HOST environmental variable using Gradle 9.3.1. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Apache Camel
The release of Apache Camel 4.18.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCFS) Data Format component; an MCP module added to Camel JBang component; and a new KafkaSecurityConfigurer class, added to the Camel Kafka component, for improved configuration of Apache Kafka authentication. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.