This week’s Java roundup for June 23rd, 2025, features news highlighting: the GA release of Jakarta EE 11; the new Agent2Agent Java SDK introduced by Red Hat; the release of Kotlin 2.2.0; the first beta release of WildFly 37; the first release candidate of JobRunr 8.0.0; and the fourth release candidate of Maven 4.0.
JDK 25
Build 29 of the JDK 25 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 28 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 26
Build 4 of the JDK 26 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 3 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Jakarta EE 11
In his weekly Hashtag Jakarta EE blog, Ivar Grimstad, Jakarta EE Developer Advocate at the Eclipse Foundation, provided an update on Jakarta EE 11, writing:
Jakarta EE 11 is finally released! It took a little longer than anticipated due to the massive undertaking the refactoring of the TCK turned out to be. But, we are here now.
Eclipse GlassFish was yet again the ratifying implementation of the Jakarta EE 11 Platform and Jakarta EE 11 Web Profile specifications. The ratifying implementations for Jakarta EE 11 Core Profile, which was released at the end of last year, were WildFly and Open Liberty. Check out the rest of the Jakarta EE Compatible Products.
More details may be found in this YouTube video. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
Spring Framework
Spring Cloud 2023.0.6, codenamed Leyton, has been released featuring bug fixes and notable updates to sub-projects: Spring Cloud Gateway 4.1.9; Spring Cloud Circuit Breaker 3.1.5; and Spring Cloud Contract 4.1.6. An important breaking change in Spring Cloud Contract is the removal of the spring-cloud-stub-runner-boot artifact from Maven Central due to new restrictions on publishing executable JARs as they are typically not used as dependencies. Developers who need this artifact in their applications are encouraged to use the Spring Cloud Contract Docker image or build it directly from source. This release is based upon Spring Boot 3.3.13. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The release of Spring for GraphQL 1.4.1 and 1.3.6 ship with bug fixes, improvements in documentation, dependency upgrades and new features such as: the addition of a toString() method in the ArgumentValue class that returns a non-empty string representation that is suitable for debugging; and support for using the GraphQL for Java GraphqlErrorBuilder class as parameter for error handlers with the location and path information available from its environment. More details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 1.4.1 and version 1.3.6.
Quarkus
The release of Quarkus 3.24.0 features: the new Dev UI Assistant that allows Quarkus extensions to communicate with an assistant module; and a simple OIDC provider Health Check for all OIDC and OAuth2 providers. Notable dependency upgrades include Hibernate ORM 7.0, Hibernate Validator 9.0 and Apache Kafka Client 4.0. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
WildFly
The first beta release of WildFly 37 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new Apache ActiveMQ Artemis commit-interval attribute that scales down configuration for defining the size of a transaction when moving messages from live to backup; and an enhancement to the platform-mbean resource that exposes new platform MXBeans, attributes and operations. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JobRunr
The first release candidate (RC.0) of JobRunr 8.0.0 introduces Carbon Aware Job Processing, a new feature that optimizes the carbon footprint, that is, the lowest amount of CO2 being generated, when scheduling jobs. Other new features include: a new @AsyncJob annotation that allows for scheduling a method to be executed as a background job; and a new runStepOnce() method added to the JobContext class that executes a supplied task exactly once assuming it hasn’t already completed. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The JobRunr team is targeting July 7, 2025 as the GA release date and has scheduled a free JobRunr 8.0 live-coding webinar for July 9, 2025.
Kotlin
The release of Kotlin 2.2.0 delivers bug fixes and notable changes such as: promoting the Guard Condition, Non-Local Break and Continue and Multi-Dollar String Interpolation features from experimental to stable; a new experimental Context Parameters feature that replaces the experimental Context Receivers feature; and enhancements to the @JsPlainObject annotation to resolve issues that compiles broken code when inlining the suspend and non-suspend functions, and producing the wrong type when the copied property is nullable in the parent interface. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Developers can learn more about this new release in the livestream event scheduled for July 10, 2025 at 16:00 UTC.
Agent2Agent Java SDK
Red Hat has announced that the Quarkus and WildFly teams have collaborated with Google on launch of Agent2Agent Java SDK, a Java library that implements the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A) for running agentic applications as A2AServers. This comes after Google has donated A2A to the Linux Foundation.
This SDK provides all the “necessary components to create agent cards, handle agent execution, and manage communication between agents” and includes a client that allows developers to interact with A2A agents using the A2A protocol.
InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.
Maven
The fourth release candidate of Maven 4.0 ships with bug fixes, improvements in documentation and new features such as: a new Maven Upgrade Tool (mvnup) that includes automatic POM discovery and support for multi-module projects; a new the new Dependency Injection mechanism that enables build extensions to provide their own custom artifact type handlers through dependency injection; and a restoration of the toString() method to the DefaultJavaToolChain class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
