This week’s Java roundup for August 25th, 2025, features news highlighting: the GA release of Apache Groovy; a new early-access build of Project Leyden; introducing the Helidon MCP server; point releases of JReleaser, LangChain4j, Quarkus, Camel Quarkus; the beta release of Open Liberty 25.0.0.9; and the first alpha release of Hibernate Validator 9.1.0.
OpenJDK
JEP 522, G1 GC: Improve Throughput by Reducing Synchronization, has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8340827 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes to reduce the overhead of the G1 garbage collector to improve synchronization between application threads and GC threads.
Project Leyden
Build 26-leydenpremain+1 of Project Leyden early-access builds, a pre-main prototype, was made available to the Java community this past week and is based on an incomplete version of JDK 26. This build features “prototype improvements to the startup time, time to peak performance, and footprint of Java programs.“
Including the upcoming release of JDK 25, three JEPs, namely: JEP 483, Ahead-of-Time Class Loading & Linking; JEP 514, Ahead-of-Time Command-Line Ergonomics; and JEP 515, Ahead-of-Time Method Profiling, have been delivered by Project Leyden.
Initially proposed in April 2020, the primary goal of Project Leyden is to “improve the startup time, time to peak performance, and footprint of Java programs.” More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this InfoQ news story.
JDK 25
Build 36 remains the current build in the JDK 25 early-access builds. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 26
Build 13 of the JDK 26 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 12 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Groovy
The release of Apache Groovy 5.0.0 provides new features that include: full compatibility with JDK 11 through JDK 25; a new @OperatorRename annotation that allows renaming of Groovy’s operator methods to align with third-party libraries with different method names; and a redesigned groovysh, the Groovy REPL shell, that is built on the Java Console Library (JLine 3) providing “cross-platform terminal support along with colorized syntax highlighting, intelligent output, command history and command completion.” Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Quarkus
The release of Quarkus 3.26.0 delivers notable changes such as: support for named persistence units and data sources in Hibernate Reactive; improvements in the Dev UI that include a new settings page for users to manage their storage; and a redesign of the HQL console that integrates the functionality introduced in the new Hibernate Tools for Natural Language module. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The Quarkus team also released versions 3.26.1, 3.20.2.2 and 3.15.6.2, labeled as “emergency releases,” to fix a regression introduced in Eclipse Vert.x 4.5.18. This regression may “lead to a pool HTTP client connection that does not have a correct state and stop making progress when receiving bytes, so the application will not observe the entirety of the HTTP response and therefore hang when receiving the data.” This has been resolved with the release of Eclipse Vert.x 4.5.19.
Helidon
The Helidon team has introduced a technology preview of the Helidon MCP Server, their support for the Model Context Protocol, that supports imperative and declarative APIs, build-time processing, and runs on Helidon’s virtual thread web server. Developers are encouraged to experiment and provide feedback.
Hibernate
The first alpha release of Hibernate Validator 9.1.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a change in the implementation of the Jakarta Validation Path interface for improved performance of cascading validation of beans; and a deprecation of using the Jakarta Validation @Valid annotation at the container level. Developers are encouraged to use this annotation at the type argument level. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
The beta release of Open Liberty 25.0.0.9 features further compliance with FIPS 140-3, Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules, with the IBM Semeru Runtimes. This complements their initial compliance of FIPS 140-3 with the IBM SDK, Java Technology Edition 8, released in March 2025.
JReleaser
Version 1.20.0 of JReleaser, a Java utility that streamlines creating project releases, has been released to feature improved support for JBang that includes: the ability to use JBang scripts and applications for JBang extensions to be built on-demand; and an option to execute JBang hooks that allows for auto provisioning a given JBang version. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
LangChain4j
The formal release (along with the tenth beta release) of LangChain4j 1.4.0 features new integrations: the watson.ai module; the audio transcription model in Azure OpenAI; and the ability to count tokens in Anthropic.
Breaking changes include: new ToolArgumentsErrorHandler and ToolExecutionErrorHandler interfaces that intercept exceptions thrown by methods annotated with @Tool; and a new DefaultExecutorProvider class that uses a pool of virtual threads as an internal default executor.
Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Apache Camel Quarkus
Maintaining alignment with Quarkus, the release of Camel Quarkus 3.26.0, composed of Camel 4.14.0 and Quarkus 3.26.0, provides notable changes such as: removal of the legacy configuration classes from the Jackson JQ and DataStax Apache Cassandra Client extensions; and a move of the RUNTIME_INIT application lifecycle customizations from the CamelContext interface to the CamelContextCustomizer interface. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
