This week’s Java roundup for February 23rd, 2026, features news highlighting: new JEP 531 Candidate, Lazy Constants; GA releases of TornadoVM 3.0 and NetBeans 29; point releases of Quarkus, JReleaser, Chicory and RefactorFirst; maintenance releases of Micronaut and Jox; and the February 2026 edition of Open Liberty.
OpenJDK
JEP 531, Lazy Constants (Third Preview), has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8329758 to Candidate status. Formerly known as StableValues, this feature proposes a third preview, with two changes, after two rounds of preview delivered in the upcoming release of JDK 26 and JDK 25. The changes include: removal of the methods, isInitialized() and orElse(), from the LazyConstant interface, as they do not align with the design goals of this feature; and a new factory method, ofLazy(), that can create a stable, pre-defined elements for all three Java collection types, namely: List, Set and Map.
JDK 26
Build 35 remains the current build in the JDK 26 early-access builds. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 27
Build 11 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 10 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.
TornadoVM
The GA release of TornadoVM 3.0.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: a refactor of the IntelliJ project generation that removes the end-user CLI flag, --intellijinit, in favor of a developer-only workflow to ensure that developers can configure their IDE and more easily switch between backends; and a refactor of their GitHub actions to split JDK 21 and JDK 25 testing, packaging and deployment. More details on this release may be found in the release notes for version JDK 25 and version JDK 21.
Apache NetBeans
The release of Apache NetBeans 29 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: improved initialization performance in the LazyProject class; a resolution to warnings from an instance of the NotificationCenterManager class by synchronizing manipulation requests from a filtered list; and an update to the DefaultGitHyperlinkProvider class to support Codeberg projects. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
The GA release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.2 features: support for Java Toolchains in Liberty Build Plugins that allows developers to separate the JDK used with build tools from the JDK used to run Liberty server and its related applications; and a resolution to CVE-2025-14914, a remote code execution vulnerability, affecting Open Liberty versions 17.0.0.3 through 26.0.0.1, that allows an attacker, as a privileged user, to upload a ZIP file archive with path traversal sequences to overwrite files and execute arbitrary code.
Quarkus
The release of Quarkus 3.32 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: integration with Project Leyden, support for automatic service registration of Quarkus applications using a service registrar like the Quarkus SmallRye Stork extension; and a more graceful shutdown that avoids an HTTP Status Code 503, Service Unavailable, as much as possible during the process. More details on this release may be found in the release notes for version 3.32.1 and version 3.32.0.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released version 4.10.9 of the Micronaut Framework based on Micronaut Core 4.10.6, features bug fixes and patch updates to modules: Micronaut Servlet, Micronaut for Spring and Micronaut MCP. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JReleaser
Version 1.23.0 of JReleaser, a Java utility that streamlines creating project releases, has been released with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: the addition of a paths property to the ChangelogGenerator class and Changelog interface to support filtering of commits to only those affecting specified paths; and an update to the ChronVer class to allow for a more lenient time formatting rule as specified in the ChronVer specification. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Chicory
The release of Chicory 1.7.0, a JVM native WebAssembly runtime, features support for: the GC Proposal for WebAssembly (WasmGC), that enables garbage-collected structure and array types in WebAssembly modules; and the Multi Memory Proposal for WebAssembly that allows WebAssembly modules to simultaneously declare and access multiple instances of memory. These new features put Chicory one step closer to full compliance of the Wasm 3.0 specification.
RefactorFirst
Jim Bethancourt, Principal Software Consultant at Improving, has released version 0.8.0 of RefactorFirst, a utility that prioritizes the parts of an application that should be refactored. This release delivers: removal of two unused methods, gitRepository() and listRepositoryContentsAtHEAD(), from the GitLogReader class that reduced memory usage of Eclipse JGit; and a resolution to a NullPointerException upon attempting a Git lookup due to the generated classes, and their associated history, that did not exist in Git. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Jox
The release of Jox 1.1.2-channels, a virtual threads library that implements an efficient Channel data structure in Java designed to be used with virtual threads, features notable changes such as: implementations of non-blocking methods, trySend() and tryReceive(), added to the Channel class and the Sink and Source interfaces, for integration with non-blocking frameworks like Netty and Vert.x; and a resolution to a failure of a Release Drafter GitHub action on pull_request events due to GitHub setting the reference to a temporary merge commit. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
