This week’s Java roundup for January 26th, 2026, features news highlighting: an update on milestone and GA release schedule for Jakarta EE 12; the January 2026 edition of Open Liberty; a point release of Quarkus; maintenance releases of Spring Shell, Apache Tomcat and Gradle; and the first and second beta releases of JHipster 9.0.
JDK 26
Build 33 of the JDK 26 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 32 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 27
Build 7 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 6 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 26 and JDK 27, 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 12, writing:
From the discussions in the Jakarta EE Platform call[s] the last couple of weeks, it looks like we won’t see a release of Jakarta EE 12 on this side of summer (on the Northern Hemisphere at least).
The reason is that since Jakarta EE 11 was delayed by a year, most of the vendors are currently working on their implementations. Which does not leave much resources to work on the Jakarta EE 12 specifications.
At the same time, we want to play catch-up with the original plan and direction directive from the Steering Committee of the Jakarta EE Working Group to release a major release of Jakarta EE 12 about six to nine months after an LTS release of Java.
So a compromise will be to release Jakarta EE 12 by the end of 2026. The deliberations are still going on, so stay tuned on more updates.
Several specifications have reached a milestone 2 release for Jakarta EE 12. These include: Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 5.0; Jakarta Persistence 4.0; Jakarta Validation 4.0; Jakarta RESTful Web Services 5.0; Jakarta Query 1.0; Jakarta Data 1.1; and Jakarta NoSQL 1.1.
Spring Framework
Spring Shell 4.0.1, the first maintenance release, delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and enhancements such as: an improved CLI parser that now accepts booleans without an explicit true or false value; and a new DefaultCompletionProvider class, a default implementation of the CompletionProvider interface, to provide completion from enumeration values if an option is of type enum. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
The GA release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.1 features: a new log throttling mechanism, enabled by default, for preventing excessive log output when the same log events repeatedly occur within a short period of time; and resolutions to notable bug fixes such as: a NullPointerException from the updateSelector() method, defined in the SocketRWChannelSelector class, due to a null instance of the NioSocketIOChannel class; and CVE-2025-12635, a vulnerability affecting Open Liberty versions 25.0.0.12 and below, that allows an attacker to exploit cross-site scripting due to improper validation of user-supplied input such that a specially-crafted URL that redirects a user to a malicious website.
Quarkus
The release of Quarkus 3.31 ships with: bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: full support for JDK 25; a new Maven packaging type, quarkus, a Quarkus-specific lifecycle optimized for Quarkus applications, that provides improved integration and more efficient lifecycle builds; and a new experimental extension, Hibernate with Panache Next, designed to simplify persistence code for Hibernate ORM, Hibernate Reactive and the Jakarta Data specification. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes for version 3.31.1 and version 3.31.0.
Apache Tomcat
Versions 11.0.18, 10.1.52 and 9.0.115 of Apache Tomcat (announced here, here and here, respectively) provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: ignoring, by default, the TLSv1.3 cipher suites, included in the ciphers attribute of the SSLHostConfig class, for configuration consistency in their implementations of the OpenSSL and Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE) specifications; and a resolution to a regression having caused failures under certain situations from the getContent() method, defined in the Java URL class, cross a result of calling the getResource() method defined in the Java ClassLoader class. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 11.0.18, version 10.1.52 and version 9.0.115.
JHipster
The second beta release of JHipster 9.0.0 features notable changes such as: support for Spring Boot 4.0; a migration to using the Spring Security @EnableWebSocketSecurity annotation to replace use of the deprecated AbstractSecurityWebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer class; and an overhaul of the CI and testing infrastructure. This release resolves an issue discovered with the first beta release, now deprecated, that had rendered the JHipster generator unstable. Further details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 9.0.0-beta.2 and version 9.0.0-beta.1.
Gradle
The release of Gradle 9.3.1 features resolutions to notable issues such as: a failure in storing the output of a build cache using filenames that contain non-Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) characters; and a restoration of the ModuleVersionSelector interface, but now deprecated, such that instances of the ExternalDependency and DependencyConstraint interfaces can be passed to the useTarget() method defined in the DependencyResolveDetails interface. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
