This week's Java roundup for March 30th, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA release of TornadoVM 4.0 and Google ADK for Java 1.0; first release candidates of Grails and Gradle; maintenance releases of Micronaut, Apache Tomcart and Apache Log4j; and an update on Jakarta EE 12.
JDK 27
Build 16 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 15 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 27, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
TornadoVM
The GA release of TornadoVM 4.0.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: a new hardware backend that supports Apple Silicon and the Apple Metal API; PTX backend support for SIMD shuffle and reduction intrinsics; and a new withCUDAGraph() method, added to the TornadoExecutionPlan class, to capture CUDA graph operations. More details on this release may be found in the release notes for version JDK 25 and version JDK 21.
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:
[The Jakarta EE Platform call was] well attended and lots of good discussions. Among other things, we talked about how the three security specifications relate to each other. For historic reasons, Jakarta Authorization is not a part of Jakarta EE Web Profile, while both Jakarta Authentication and Jakarta Security are. There has been talk about merging the security specifications into one Jakarta Security at some point. The first step would be to include Authorization in Web Profile. This is certainly something we can do for Jakarta EE 12.
Several specifications are in progress for a milestone 2 release for Jakarta EE 12. These include: Jakarta Connectors 3.0; Jakarta Faces 5.0; Jakarta Transactions 2.1; and Jakarta JSON Processing 2.2.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released version 4.10.11 of the Micronaut Framework, based on Micronaut Core 4.10.20, features bug fixes and patch updates to modules: Micronaut OpenAPI and Micronaut Logging. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Grails
The first release candidate of Grails 7.1.0 ships with bug fixes and notable changes such as: configuration of the Groovy invokedynamic moved from the generated build.gradle file to the Grails Gradle Plugin to centralize configuration; and a change to the @Service annotation that now automatically inherits a datasource from the mapping block of the domain class. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Google Agent Development Kit
Google has released version 1.0.0 of their open-source Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Java framework that provides bug fixes, documentation improvements and new features: use of the InMemoryArtifactService class in the AgentExecutorProducer class, to complement use of the InMemorySessionService class, in building an instance of an AgentExecutor; and the ability to simultaneously use the features, output_schema and tools, for models that do not natively support both features at once. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
Apache Tomcat
Versions 11.0.21, 10.1.54 and 9.0.117 of Apache Tomcat (announced here, here and here) deliver notable changes such as: a resolution to an issue where non-blocking flushing code for NIO and TLS that meant that a response may not have been fully written until the connection was closed; and improved error handling for HTTP/2 and the EncryptInterceptor class. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 11.0.21, version 10.1.54 and version 9.0.117.
Apache Log4j
The release of Apache Log4j 2.25.4 ships with notable changes such as: a restoration of alignment between documented and actual configuration attributes in the Rfc5424Layout class after it was migrated from a factory method to the builder pattern in version 2.21.0; a resolution to formatting and sanitization issues in XML and RFC5424 layouts; and improved handling of invalid characters and non-standard values in the XmlLayout, Log4j1XmlLayout and MapMessage classes. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Gradle
The first release candidate of Gradle 9.5.0 provides notable changes such as: improvements to Gradle Task failure diagnostics and reporting that now include provenance information and clearer logging when the client JVM is incompatible; and improvements to build authoring with a new disallowChanges() method, added to DomainObjectCollection interface, such that elements can no longer be added to or removed from the collection. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.