This week’s Java roundup for November 3rd, 2025, features news highlighting: a new Jakarta AI specification; the fourteenth milestone release of GlassFish 8.0; second release candidates of Spring Boot 4.0, Spring for GraphQL 2.0 and Spring Batch 6.0; the release of Infinispan 16.0; and the November 2025 edition of Open Liberty.
OpenJDK
It was a busy week in the OpenJDK ecosystem during the week of November 3rd, 2025 highlighting three JEPs elevated from Proposed to Target to Targeted and three JEPs elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 26. Further details may be found in this InfoQ news story.
After hearing no objections during the review, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, has declared that the proposed schedule for JDK 26 is now final:
- Rampdown Phase One (fork from main line): December 4, 2025
- Rampdown Phase Two: January 15, 2026
- Initial Release Candidate: February 5, 2026
- Final Release Candidate: February 19, 2026
- General Availability: March 17, 2026
JDK 26 will be the first non-LTS release since JDK 25, released in September 2025.
JDK 26
Build 23 of the JDK 26 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 22 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
For JDK 26, 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:
I am happy to announce that the creation review of the Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence specification was approved by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee.
The Jakarta EE Platform project started discussing the potential inclusion of Jakarta NoSQL 1.1 in Jakarta EE 12. The lacking piece of the puzzle before it is really a candidate is the new standard communication driver. The project is aiming for including this in their Milestone 2 release, which will happen in the beginning of December. Milestone 2 of Jakarta EE 12 is planned for December 9.
As per the release plan, developers can anticipate the final release of Jakarta EE 12 in July 2026.
GlassFish
The fourteenth milestone release of GlassFish 8.0.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: a resolution to integration bugs in the Jakarta Security specification that takes advantage of the caller details from the Java Principal interface based on the Jakarta Authorization specification; and an integration of the latest version of Eclipse Concurrō as the implementation for the Jakarta Concurrency specification. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Framework
The second release candidate of Spring Boot 4.0.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a restoration of support for Eclipse Jersey now that it is compatible with the Jakarta RESTful Web Services 4.0 specification; a new OpenTelemetryLoggingAutoConfiguration class that extracts auto-configuration of OpenTelemetry logging from the OpenTelemetrySdkAutoConfiguration class; and a split of the spring-boot-micrometer-tracing module into specific modules that support Brave and OpenTelemetry. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The second release candidate of Spring for GraphQL 2.0.0 ships with dependency upgrades and one new feature that allows implementations of interfaces, mapped with the @EntityMapping annotation to be mapped as well. This aligns with existing support with the @SchemaMapping and @BatchMapping annotations. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes and this wiki page.
The second release candidate of Spring Batch 6.0.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and two new features that provide support for: contextual lambda-style configuration to configure batch artefacts for a more concise and readable way to define flat file item readers and writers; and delete operations in MongoDB DAOs with new methods, deleteExecutionContext() and deleteJobExecutionParameters(), defined in the MongoExecutionContextDao and MongoJobExecutionDao classes, respectively. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Infinispan
The release of Infinispan 16.0.0, codenamed Keep Rollin’, delivers new features such as: in-place rolling upgrades of live Infinispan clusters with zero downtime; an overhaul of clustering messages incorporating the best practices from Protocol Buffers along with the Infinispan ProtoStream serialization library; and an aggregation of the multiple query modules in a single JAR, infinispan-query, that will allow for future JPMS encapsulation. The team also announced that they are dropping .Final from their versioning. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
The release of Open Liberty 25.0.0.11 delivers notable bug fixes such as: an AuthenticationException in a single sign-on environment, due to the WebSphere Liberty server not being able to locate an instance of the Subject class containing a user who requires temporary elevated authentication; and inconsistent behavior using the server create command that passes a parameter containing non-alphanumeric characters. More details on this release may be found in this list of bugs.
Hibernate
The release of Hibernate Validator 9.1.0.Final ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and performance improvements such as: a new RandomAccessPath interface, an extension of the Jakarta Validation Path interface, for situations where the path is represented by an array (or some other collection) that exposes access to the nodes by index; and constraint initialization across shared data that can cache and reuse elements required to construct a constraint validator. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The Hibernate team has introduced the MongoDB Extension for Hibernate ORM as a public preview. This new extension allows Java developers to build modern applications using the MongoDB document database model with Hibernate features such as annotations defined in the Jakarta Persistence specification, Hibernate Query Language (HQL), Criteria API, and caching.
Micrometer
The GA release of Micrometer Metrics 1.16.0 provides bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a migration of all nullability annotations to JSpecify; and a new MeterConvention interface that offers a direct way for developers to control the convention of widely-adopted instrumentation components. More details on this release, including breaking changes and deprecations, may be found in the release notes.
The GA release of Micrometer Tracing ships with dependency upgrades and two new features: a migration of all nullability annotations to JSpecify; and support for receiving and extracting multiple headers of the same key. Further details on this release, including deprecations, may be found in the release notes.
Project Reactor
The GA release of Project Reactor 2025.0.0 provides dependency upgrades to reactor-core 3.8.0, reactor-netty 1.3.0, reactor-pool 1.2.0, reactor-addons 3.6.0 and reactor-kotlin-extensions 1.3.0. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Similarly, Project Reactor 2024.0.12, the twelfth maintenance release, provides dependency upgrades to reactor-core 3.7.13, reactor-netty 1.2.12, reactor-pool 1.1.6, reactor-kotlin-extensions 1.2.5 and reactor-kafka 1.3.25. There was also a realignment to version 2024.0.12 with the reactor-addons 3.5.4 artifacts that remain unchanged. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
