This week’s Java roundup for May 12th, 2025 features news highlighting: the GA releases of LangChain4j 1.0, Eclipse Vert.x 5.0 and Spring Data 2025.0.0; the May 2025 edition of the Payara Platform; second release candidates for Hibernate ORM 7.0 and Hibernate Reactive 3.0; and the first beta release of Hibernate Search 8.0.
OpenJDK
It was a busy week in the OpenJDK ecosystem during the week of May 12th, 2025 highlighting: two JEPs elevated from Proposed to Target to Targeted and four JEPs elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 25; and one JEP elevated from its JEP Draft to Candidate status. Two of these will be finalized after their respective rounds of preview. Further details may be found in this InfoQ news story.
JDK 25
Build 23 of the JDK 25 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 22 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 25, 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 11 and Jakarta EE 12, writing:
The release of the Jakarta EE 11 Platform specification is right around the corner. The issues with the service outage that affected our Jenkins CI instances are now resolved, and the work is progressing. The release date is expected to be in June.
All the plans for Jakarta EE 12 have been completed and approved (with the exception of Jakarta Activation, which will have its plan review started on Monday [May 19, 2025]).
Two new specifications, Jakarta Portlet 4.0 and Jakarta Portlet Bridge 7.0, have been migrated over from JSR 362 and JSR 378, respectively. They join the new Jakarta Query 1.0 specification.
The road to Jakarta EE 11 included four milestone releases, the release of the Core Profile in December 2024, the release of Web Profile in April 2025, and a fifth milestone and first release candidate of the Platform before its anticipated GA release in June 2025.
Spring Framework
The fifth milestone release of Spring Framework 7.0.0 delivers bug fixes, improvements in documentation, dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for the Jackson 3.0 release train that deprecate support for the Jackson 2.0 release train; and updates to the new new API versioning feature that allows for validating supported API versions against only explicitly configured ones. There was also a deprecation of the PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer and PreferencesPlaceholderConfigurer classes for removal. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The release of Spring Framework 6.2.7 and 6.1.20 address CVE-2025-22233, a follow up to CVE-2024-38820, a vulnerability in which the toLowerCase() method, defined in the Java String class, had some Locale class-dependent exceptions that could potentially result in fields not being protected as expected. This was a result of the resolution for CVE-2022-22968 that made patterns of the disallowedFields field, defined in DataBinder class, case insensitive. In this latest CVE, cases where it is possible to bypass the checks for the disallowedFields field still exist.
The release of Spring Data 2025.0.0 ships with new features such as: support for the Vector interface and vector search in the MongoDB and Apache Cassandra databases; and support for the creation of indices using storage-attached indexing from Cassandra 5.0. The upcoming GA release of Spring Boot 3.5.0 will upgrade to Spring Data 2025.0.0. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The third milestone release of Spring Data 2025.1.0 ships with: support for JSpecify on sub-projects, such as Spring Data Commons, Spring Data JPA, Spring Data MongoDB, Spring Data LDAP, Spring Data Cassandra, Spring Data KeyValue, Spring Data Elasticsearch; and the ability to optimize Spring Data repositories at build time using the Spring AOT framework. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The first release candidate of Spring AI 1.0.0 features “the final set of breaking changes, bug fixes, and new functionality before the stable release.” Key breaking changes include: renaming of fields, such as CHAT_MEMORY_RETRIEVE_SIZE_KEY to TOP_K, in the VectorStoreChatMemoryAdvisor class; and a standardization in the naming convention of the chat memory repository that now includes repository as a suffix throughout the codebase. The team is planning the GA release for Tuesday, May 20, 2025. More details on this release may be found in the upgrade notes and InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story of the GA release.
Payara
Payara has released their May 2025 edition of the Payara Platform that includes Community Edition 6.2025.5, Enterprise Edition 6.26.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.75.0. All three releases deliver: dependency upgrades; a new features that adds the capability to move the master password file to a user defined location; and a resolution to a NullPointerException upon attempting to retrieve the X.509 client certificate sent on an HTTP request using the jakarta.servlet.request.X509Certificate request attribute. Further details on these releases may be found in the release notes for Community Edition 6.2025.5 and Enterprise Edition 6.26.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.75.0.
Eclipse Vert.x
After eight release candidates, Eclipse Vert.x 5.0 has been released with new features such as: support for the Java Platform Module System (JPMS); a new VerticleBase class that replaces the deprecated AbstractVerticle class due to the removal of the callback asynchronous model in favor of the future model; and support for binary data in the OpenAI modules. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and list of deprecations and breaking changes.
LangChain4j
The formal release (along with the fifth beta release) of LangChain4j 1.0.0 delivers modules released under the release candidate, namely: langchain4j-core; langchain4j; langchain4j-http-client; langchain4j-http-client-jdk and langchain4j-open-ai with the the remaining modules still under the fifth beta release. Breaking changes include: a rename of the ChatLanguageModel and StreamingChatLanguageModel interfaces to ChatModel and StreamingChatModel, respectively; and the OpenAiStreamingChatModel, OpenAiStreamingLanguageModel and OpenAiModerationModel classes now map exceptions to align with the other OpenAI*Model classes. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes
Hibernate
The second release candidate of Hibernate ORM 7.0.0 delivers new features such as: a new QuerySpecification interface that provides a common set of methods for all query specifications that allow for iterative, programmatic building of a query; and a migration from Hibernate Commons Annotations (HCANN) to the new Hibernate Models project for low-level processing of an application domain model. There is also support for the Jakarta Persistence 3.2 specification, the latest version targeted for Jakarta EE 11. The team anticipates this as the only release candidate before the GA release. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and the migration guide.
The second release candidate of Hibernate Reactive 3.0.0 (along with version 2.4.8) provides notable changes such as: the removal of JReleaser configuration from the codebase as it will be now located inside the release scripts; and the addition of Java @Override annotations to places where it was missing. These versions upgrade to Hibernate ORM 7.0.0.CR2 and 6.6.15.Final, respectively. Further details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 3.0.0.CR2 and version 2.4.8.
The first beta release of Hibernate Search 8.0.0 ships with: dependency upgrades; compatibility with the latest versions of Elasticsearch 9.0 and OpenSearch 3.0; and the first implementation of the type-safe field references and the Hibernate Search static metamodel generator. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
