23 articles
Helidon 27 is out, and it ties its version number to the JDK release cycle, including for LTS support. Helidon is Oracle's microservice library, released under the ASL 2.0 license; this version has some feature upgrades and separates the MicroProfile support apart from Helidon proper.
Xberg 1.0 has been released. Xberg is a document extraction engine, describing itself as a "document intelligence framework." It's written in Rust, with fifteen generated language bindings, and a very descriptive data model that provides a *lot* of flexibility.
Roseau, a new breaking-change detector for Java libraries, compares your code against your last released baseline and fails the build when the API contract breaks. JUnit already uses it. The reflex says the compiler and tests cover this, but if that were the case, updates would be easier than they are.
GraphCompose is an MIT-licensed Java DSL for generating PDFs from a semantic document model, with themed templates for CVs, invoices, proposals, and reports built in.The 1.6.4 release adds clip-path shape containers, advanced tables, and two new business templates.
The MetBeans IDE has been updated: NetBeans 30 has been released. This is a regular quarterly update, and includes some useful support for Java 26 and some enterprise features, but is mostly an incremental change.
David M. Lloyd has another piece on modern reflection, this time on VarHandle - and as usual, it's highly informative. It replaces a lot of Unsafe usage, and demonstrates quite a bit of atomic access fundamentals as well, and it opens up offheap access, too.
Leaning Technologies released CheerpJ 4.3, a WebAssembly-packaged JVM that runs unmodified Java applications — including applets, JNLP applications, and Oracle Forms — in a browser without a plugin. This release adds ergonomic features like in-window file upload and download, long-press-as-hover for Swing, and stability gains, and sets up a major startup-time improvement for 5.0.
Timefold Solver, OptaPlanner's successor, hits 2.0 with list variables promoted, a new Neighborhoods API, and a quietly consequential license shift: the explainability APIs you built on in 1.x now require a commercial edition. The solving core stays Apache 2.0, but the answer to "why did the solver pick this?" is now a paid feature.
Chicory Redline delivers native-speed WebAssembly on the JVM by compiling the Cranelift compiler to Wasm and running it through Chicory itself - native code, bundled in a JAR, with no JNI required. Already shipping in JRuby with a 10x parsing improvement. Early but credible, and the cleanest Panama FFM use case to appear so far.
Pilot 0.1.0 is a Maven plugin that provides a text console for the Java build tool, providing features like update checking, conflict detection, CVE auditing, dependence tree display, and more in a text console application.
MethodHandle has been in the JDK since Java 7, and most Java developers have a vague sense that it exists somewhere near invokedynamic and lambda internals. David Lloyd's ongoing series covers the mechanics thoroughly. What it doesn't cover is when you'd actually reach for it - and why.
Optimization isn't a single measurement and a fix. It's whack-a-mole: find the loudest problem, fix it, then look at what the problem was hiding. Jonathan Vogel's second installment in his Java performance series shows this process live, with JFR recordings and flame graphs - including a contention bug that was completely invisible until he pushed the concurrency high enough for it to matter.
DoytoQuery's author published a performance comparison against a number of data access frameworks, and it came out well - which isn't surprising, given that its author wrote the framework. They're deservedly proud of their work, and DoytoQuery has some interesting concepts in how it works, and may be worth further investigation, although there's a documentation gap and, as with most data access frameworks, an impedance mismatch.
OpenJDK leet koda Hanz Franz MacNamaramara told ByteCode.News today that the new structured concurrency implementation in the JVM was being rewritten in Python, using the most current AI modeling available.
Piotr Minkowski's new article on Spring Kafka offset behavior ("Deep Dive into Kafka Offset Commit with Spring Boot") goes into how Spring's Kafka reader commits read offsets: it treats the read operation as a committable transaction, which means your code needs to be aware of the offset write semantics to make sure you don't lose messages. Kafka is powerful precisely because it's not a simple queue - messages can be replayed via offset manipulation - but that same model means offset commit semantics matter in ways they never would with a fire-and-forget message broker.
Mirko Caserta has released Bruce 2.0, a library that wraps JCA with a clean API. Bruce takes the agony of all the nuts and bolts of security and, well, fixes it. Security libraries earn trust slowly and should - this is not the domain where "looks good to me" is sufficient due diligence, but the reduced API surface might be a good thing for the normative case.
The OpenJDK team has released Java 26 - a non-LTS release, but one that supports some important language and API updates, along with some potentially useful ahead-of-time updates for garbage collection and runtime caching. Language updates include progress towards making final mean final - at last - and adding HTTP3 and QUIC support.
JohannaWeb's Project Falcon is a Discord-style desktop client built on top of the Bluesky AT Protocol. The concept is: what if Discord's UX wrapped a decentralized social graph instead of a proprietary one? Built by one person, it's an impressive piece of work.
For Java, JEP 8357464, Enhanced Local Variable Declarations , is an extension of JEP 441, Pattern Matching for switch . It provides local declarations and value extraction in strongly-typed code. JEP...
In a number of applications I work with, I use JSON everywhere, as a sort of lingua franca. I typically do this with Jackson, and with Spring Boot 4's primary use of Jackson 3, it hit me that I might...