This week's Java roundup for September 21st, 2026, features news highlighting: GA releases of TornadoVM 7.0 and Groovy 6.0; point releases of GraalVM and Gradle; maintenance releases of Quarkus and GDK for Micronaut; the seventh release candidate of Maven 4.0; milestone releases of Micrometer Metrics and Tracing; and beta releases of Open Liberty and Hibernate ORM.
OpenJDK
JEP 544, Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation, has been elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 28. This JEP proposes to improve application startup and warmup time such that it is instantly available with optimized native code when the HotSpot JVM starts. This enables applications to achieve peak performance more quickly and to sustain peak performance. The review is expected to conclude on Monday, September 28, 2026.
JEP 546, Adaptive Heap Sizing for ZGC, has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8377305 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes to "enhance the Z Garbage Collector to adaptively adjust the size of the heap based on the resources available, the application's needs, and the needs of neighboring applications contending for the same resources."
JEP 545, Faster Startup and Warmup with ZGC, has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8329758 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes to "improve application startup and warmup by enhancing the Z Garbage Collector to acquire and prepare physical memory more swiftly and efficiently in response to application needs."
JDK 28
Build 17 of the JDK 28 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 16 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 28, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
GraalVM
The release of GraalVM 25.4 delivers notable changes such as: new classes, PullThroughPhiPhase and DuplicationPhase, as additional compiler configuration optimizations; and an extension of the OptimizeDivPhase class to include magic-number optimizations for unsigned integer division and remainder operations by constant values. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Oracle Labs has also released version 5.1.5 of the Graal Development Kit for Micronaut featuring alignment with Micronaut 5.1.5. 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. These are designed to compile ahead-of-time with GraalVM Native Image and fully supported by Oracle. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
TornadoVM
The release of TornadoVM 7.0.0 ships with bug fixes and new features such as: a new TileContext class to complement the existing KernelContext class and @Parallel annotation for writing GPU kernels in Java; and an improvement in the testFloatAtomicAddOpenCL() method, defined in the FloatAtomicFail class, that guards against running the test on a CUDA backend that were plagued with intermittent failures. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes for version 7.0.1 and version 7.0.0.
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 project is getting ready for the upcoming release of Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile. The plan is to release before JakartaOne Livestream on December 1st. The specification document is being updated as we speak, Jakarta CDI 5.0 is released, the JSON specifications are pretty much ready, and Jakarta REST is getting close to publishing a milestone release. Join the weekly Jakarta EE Platform calls to stay up-to-date with the progress.
A new specification, Jakarta CRaC, is open for community review. This is an opportunity for developers to provide feedback before the upcoming vote on its creation review.
Spring Framework
It was a busy week over at Spring as the various teams have delivered second milestone releases of: Spring Boot, Spring Batch, Spring Security, Spring AMQP, Spring Integration, Spring Data, Spring Framework, Spring for GraphQL and Spring for Apache Kafka. There were also first milestone releases of Spring AI, Spring Cloud, Spring Web Services and Spring LDAP. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
Apache Groovy
After three release candidates, the GA release of Apache Groovy 6.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and one new feature that improves the performance of the lexer and parser by: flattening the number-literal fragments to character classes; splitting the ASCII identifiers onto a predicate-free Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) path; replacing the regular expression-based lexer predicates with direct character tests; and gating the annotation element values so AdaptivePredict does not explore assignment expressions. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
The beta release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.10 delivers beta support for JDK 27. Developers should note that, with G1 now the default GC in all environments, users running Open Liberty in a constrained environment may experience a different garbage collection behavior compared to earlier Java versions.
Quarkus
The release of Quarkus 3.39.5 ships with resolutions to 32 CVEs that affected numerous technologies in the Quarkus ecosystem. As acknowledged by the Quarkus team:
Yes, that's a lot of them, AI discovers a lot of CVEs these days, and Quarkus aggregates a lot of components.
These CVE resolutions were backported to the 3.33 and 3.37 release trains. Furhter details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Hibernate
The second beta release (along with a follow-up third beta release) of Hibernate ORM 8.0 provides notable changes such as: expanded support for Jakarta Persistence 4.0-M4 that include use of the new @PostCreate and @PreClose annotations that allow for listeners to observe the lifecycle of entity managers and agents; and version locking for the StatelessSession and EntityAgent interfaces for improved concurrency. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 8.0.0.Beta3 and version 8.0.0.Beta2.
Micrometer
The second milestone release of Micrometer Metrics 1.18.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: improvements to the MultiGauge class that eliminates the need to remove and re-register an instance of the Gauge interface if there was an overwrite; and the ability to configure custom instances of the JmsProcessObservationConvention and JmsPublishObservationConvention interfaces. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The second milestone release of Micrometer Tracing 1.8.0 ships with documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and one new feature that optimizes the baggage propagation from OpenTelemetry when no remote fields are configured. There was a depreciation of support for the Zipkin Exporter as it was discontinued by OpenTelemetry with the release of version 1.65.0. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Gradle
The release of Gradle 9.8.0 provides new features such as: support for Java 27 in the Gradle daemon and Java toolchains; support for reusing the Maven mirror repository settings with a simple flag; improved build authoring by exposing the Copy and Sync tasks to an instance of the DirectoryProperty interface; and a 45% performance improvement in WindowsOS. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Apache Maven
The seventh release candidate of Apache Maven 4.0 delivers numerous bug fixes from RC6, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new AsyncDrainWriter class, containing a non-blocking tryLock() method, to wrap an instance of the Consumer interface with a lock-free ConcurrentLinkedQueue; and optimizations made to the DefaultGraphBuilder and PhaseComparator classes for improved performance. This release is expected to be the last one before the formal GA release in "the coming weeks pending community feedback." More details on this release may be found in the release notes.