This week’s Java roundup for February 9th, 2026, features news highlighting: the first release candidate of JDK 26 and Gradle 9.4; milestone releases of Micrometer Metrics and Micrometer Tracing; beta releases of Open Liberty 26.0.0.2 and EclipseStore 4.0; and maintenance releases of Spring Framework, Micronaut, Quarkus.
JDK 27
Build 9 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 8 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 26
Build 35 of the JDK 26 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 34 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
As per the JDK 26 release schedule, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, formally declared that JDK 26 has entered its first release candidate as there are no unresolved P1 bugs in Build 34. The anticipated GA release is scheduled for March 17, 2026 and will include this final set of 10 features:
For JDK 26 and JDK 27, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.
Spring Framework
Spring Framework 7.0.4, the fourth maintenance release, delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: modifications to the getMethodAnnotation()/getMethodAnnotations() and hasMethodAnnotation()/hasMethodAnnotations() methods, both defined in the MethodParameter and AnnotatedMethod classes, to cache instances of the Java Annotation interface and obtain values returned from those methods in a local array; and a new overloaded requiredBody() method, added to the RestClient.ResponseSpec interface, that would return a non-null value to align with an existing related Kotlin extension. This version will be consumed in the upcoming release of Spring Boot 4.0.3. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
The beta release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.2 features: enhancements to their mcpServer-1.0 feature that includes bug fixes, role-based authorization, request IDs, and the new _meta field that allows clients and servers to attach additional metadata to their interactions; and a new property, displayCustomizedExceptionText, for use in the server.xml file which allows users to override the Open Liberty default error messages with clearer, user-defined messages.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released version 4.10.8 of the Micronaut Framework, based on Micronaut Core 4.10.15, features bug fixes and patch updates to modules: Micronaut Maven Plugin, Micronaut SQL Libraries, Micronaut Logging, Micronaut Discovery Client and Micronaut Data. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
EclipseStore
The first beta release of EclipseStore 4.0 introduces an integration with JVector, a graph-based index for nearest neighbor searching, that transforms EclipseStore into a pure Java vector database. JVector has been fully integrated in their GigaMap collection that provides features such as: Java native persistence; lazy entity access; and on-disk indexing. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes for EclipseStore and its sister project, EclipseSerializer.
Quarkus
Quarkus 3.31.3, the second maintenance release (version 3.31.0 was skipped), ships with notable changes such as: a resolution to an issue with a missing image in the Docker file when generating an application with JDK 25; and the addition of an expected JVM option, --add-opens, via an instance of the JvmModulesReconfigurer interface when executing tests with the IsolatedTestModeMain class. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Micrometer
The second milestone release of Micrometer Application Metrics 1.17.0 provides documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: an improved TelegrafStatsdLineBuilder class that resolves escaping issues using the equal sign (=) in tags; and support for compressing the metrics payload in the OtlpConfig interface and OtlpHttpMetricsSender class for improved performance, especially in larger applications. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The third milestone release of Micrometer Tracing Facade 1.7.0 delivers: dependency upgrades to Micrometer 1.17.0-M2 and OpenTelemetery Instrumentation 2.24.0; and a resolution to a NullPointerException from the error(Throwable throwable) method, defined in the OtelSpan class, due to the Java Throwable getMessage() method returning null, a violation of the OpenTelemetry API contract for non-nullable parameters. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Gradle
The first release candidate of Gradle 9.4.0 ships with: support for the upcoming release of JDK 26; improvements to test reporting and execution, using a custom implementation of the JUnit TestEngine interface, where discovery and execution of tests are not required to be defined in classes; and improvements to configuration cache reporting with multiple lambdas will now be able to explicitly identify each lambda with its associated type of action or specification. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
