This week's Java roundup for May 11th, 2026, features news highlighting: three OpenJDK JEPs targeted for JDK 27; introducting Azul Payara Community and the WildFly wado CLI tool; point releases of LangChain4j and Google ADK; and maintenance releases of Micronaut and OpenXava.
OpenJDK
JEP 523, Make G1 the Default Garbage Collector in All Environments, has been elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 27. This JEP proposes to set the Garbage-First Garbage Collector (G1 GC) as the "default in all environments, rather than just server environments." If a garbage collector is not specified on the command line, the G1 GC will always be selected by the HotSpot JVM. The review is expected to conclude on May 19, 2026.
JEP 534, Compact Object Headers by Default, has been elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 27. This JEP proposes to make JEP 519, Compact Object Headers, delivered in JDK 25, the default object header layout in the HotSpot JVM. More details on Compact Object Headers may be found in this InfoQ news story. The review is expected to conclude on May 19, 2026.
JEP 537, Vector API (Twelfth Incubator), has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8381663 to Candidate to Proposed to Target (announced here and here, respectively) for JDK 27. This JEP proposes an twelfth incubation, with no substantial implementation changes since JDK 25, after eleven rounds of incubation delivered in JDK 16 through JDK 26. This feature introduces an API to "express vector computations that reliably compile at runtime to optimal vector instructions on supported CPU architectures, thus achieving performance superior to equivalent scalar computations." The Vector API will continue to incubate until the necessary features of Project Valhalla become available as preview features. At that time, the Vector API team will adapt the Vector API and its implementation to use them, and will promote the Vector API from Incubation to Preview. The review is expected to conclude on May 19, 2026.
JEP 538, PEM Encodings of Cryptographic Objects, has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8376991 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes to finalize this feature, with changes, after two rounds of preview delivered in JDK 25 and JDK 26. This feature offers "an API for encoding objects that represent cryptographic keys, certificates, and certificate revocation lists into the widely-used Privacy-Enhanced Mail (PEM) transport format, and for decoding from that format back into objects." This JEP will support conversions between PEM text and cryptographic objects in PKCS #8 and X.509 binary formats. Changes include: a reclassification of the PEM record class to a regular class as a convenience for providing constructors that accept Base64-encoded content in byte arrays; and a rename of the DEREncodable interface to BinaryEncodable to more accurately describe the binary data stored in PEM text.
Oracle has announced that maintenance of the macOS/x64 port will end with the release of JDK 27 due to Apple phasing out its support for the x64 architecture. However, developers interested in continuing to maintain this port should let the team know with the caveat that significant time and effort will be required to do so.
JDK 27
Build 22 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 21 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.
Azul Payara
Five months after the Azul acquisition of Payara, the team has introduced Azul Payara Community as the new name for Payara Platform Community. Developers will still have the convenience of choosing to work with Azul Payara Server Community or Azul Payara Micro Community for their applications. The official logo has also been updated to reflect this change.
On the blog post, Dominika Tasarz-Sochacka, Senior Developer Advocate, Payara Community, Jakarta EE & Foojay.io at Azul, described what this rebranding means to the Java community, writing:
The rebrand is part of bringing Azul Payara Community properly into the Azul portfolio alongside Azul Zulu (OpenJDK), Azul Prime, Intelligence Cloud and Azul Payara’s commercial offering. It's the same open-source project with a new home in the broader Azul ecosystem.
The team has also released the May 2026 edition of Azul Payara 7 featuring bug and security fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: an update to the JaccProviderCompatibilityStartup class that migrates the heritage Payara 6 JAAC provider and policy configuration factory to the Eclipse Exousia DefaultPolicy and DefaultPolicyConfigurationFactory classes, respectively; and the creation of new Payara deployment descriptors that reflects an update to support for Jakarta EE 11 and removes incorrectly implemented functionality of defining managed executors, managed scheduled executors, managed thread factories. and context services. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for Community Edition 7.2026.5, Enterprise Edition 6.38.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.87.0.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released version 4.10.14 of the Micronaut Framework, based on Micronaut Core 4.10.23, features bug fixes, a patch update to Micronaut Data and a dependency upgrade to Netty 4.2.13, the latest release that addresses over a dozen CVEs. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
WildFly
The WildFly team has introduced a new open-source command line tool, wado, to build and run WildFly containers of different versions in both domain and standalone modes. Written in Rust, wado, short for WildFly admin containers, allows developers to build and run WildFly containers with sensible defaults for naming, ports and credentials.
LangChain4j
The formal release (along with the twenty-fifth beta release) of LangChain4j 1.15.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: an integration of the Docling document parser; and a new defaultValue() attribute, added to the @P annotation, that allows tool developers to specify a runtime fallback value when an LLM does not provide an argument. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
OpenXava
The release of OpenXava 7.7.2 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: a refined AGENTS.md file for improved AI code generation when writing new actions; and the ability to add a dashboard with a simple prompt. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Google Agent Development Kit
The release of Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Java 1.3.0 ships with bug fixes and new features such as: a new ChatCompletionsHTTPClient class that adds a chat completion API that supports the Google Cloud Apigee API; and a new SkillSource interface that supports loading skills from various sources in the ADK. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.