This week’s Java roundup for October 13th, 2025, features news highlighting: two new OpenJDK candidates; Jakarta EE 12 specifications with milestone 1 releases; the October 2025 edition of the Payara Platform; the GA releases of WildFly 38 and Testcontainers 2.0; and the first release candidates of Spring Framework 7.0 and Spring Data 2025.1.0.
OpenJDK
JEP 529, Vector API (Eleventh Incubator), has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8328351 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes an eleventh incubation, with no substantial implementation changes since JDK 25, after ten rounds of incubation delivered in JDK 16 through JDK 25. This feature introduces an API to “express vector computations that reliably compile at runtime to optimal vector instructions on supported CPU architectures, thus achieving performance superior to equivalent scalar computations.” The Vector API will continue to incubate until the necessary features of Project Valhalla become available as preview features. At that time, the Vector API team will adapt the Vector API and its implementation to use them, and will promote the Vector API from Incubation to Preview.
JEP 528, Post-Mortem Crash Analysis with jcmd, has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8369012 to Candidate status. This JEP proposes to extend the jcmd tool to diagnose a JVM in the event of a crash. The intent is to move this kind of serviceability into jcmd as opposed to using the jhsdb utility or the Serviceability Agent.
JDK 26
Build 20 of the JDK 26 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 19 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 12
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:
The ballot for inclusion of Jakarta Query 1.0 in the Jakarta EE Platform and Jakarta EE Web Profile concluded successfully. As a part of Milestone 1 in the Jakarta EE 12 Release Plan, a good portion of specifications published a M1 release of their specification artifact. The Platform team will most likely publish an M1 release of the APIs in near future.
A proposal for a new specification called Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence has been submitted and is now out for public community review. In addition to commenting on the proposal itself, you can also provide input in the EMO tracking issue. The next steps for this specification will be to go through a Creation Review by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. That will be started as soon as the community review is done.
Specifications with their respective M1 releases published on Maven Central currently are: Jakarta Servlet 6.2, Jakarta Expression Language 6.1, Jakarta Pages 4.1, Jakarta WebSocket 2.3, Jakarta Data 1.1, Jakarta NoSQL 1.1, Jakarta Concurrency 3.2, Jakarta Query 1.0, Jakarta Activation 2.2 and Jakarta Mail 2.2.
The M1 release for the Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 5.0 specification has been completed, but not yet published on Maven Central.
Spring Framework
The first release candidate of Spring Framework 7.0.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: refinements to the new dedicated @Retryable, @ConcurrencyLimit and @EnableResilientMethods annotations included in the Resiliency Features; improvements to the PropagationContextElement operator to be more idiomatic for Kotlin users; and baseline upgrades to JUnit 6.0 and Jackson 3.0. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and wiki page.
The Spring team has also released Spring Framework 6.2.12 that fixes CVE-2025-41254, Spring Framework STOMP CSRF Vulnerability, a vulnerability affecting Spring Framework versions up to and including 6.2.11, that allows an attacker, taking advantage of a security bypass, to send unauthorized messages through applications created using Simple Text Oriented Messaging Protocol (STOMP) over WebSocket.
The first release candidate of Spring Data 2025.1.0 features support for: Spring Framework 7; Jakarta Persistence 3.2 and Jakarta Servlet 6.1 under Jakarta EE 11; Kotlin 2.2; and the recent release of Jackson 3.0. Other new features include: an increased use of the Jakarta Persistence Query Language (JPQL) to ultimately replace use of the QueryCriteria interface; and support for composite IDs (or composite keys) in the Spring Data JDBC and Spring Data R2DBC sub-projects for improved mapping of an entity with an attribute for each column in the composite ID. More details on this release, including breaking changes, may be found in the release notes.
Payara
Payara has released their October 2025 edition of the Payara Platform that includes Community Edition 6.2025.10, Enterprise Edition 6.31.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.80.0. Along with component upgrades, all three editions deliver: the ability to configure cache time-to-live settings for application deployments to optimize memory usage and deployment behavior; and a resolution to slow response times when a Payara server instance, in a degraded state, now allows the admin interface to respond normally. Further details on these releases may be found in the release notes for Community Edition 6.2025.10 and Enterprise Edition 6.31.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.80.0.
WildFly
The release of WildFly 38 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: continued support for Jakarta EE 11 with implementations of the Jakarta Persistence, Jakarta Context and Dependency Injection and Jakarta Authorization specifications in WildFly Preview; support for MicroProfile 7.1 that features the updated MicroProfile Telemetry and MicroProfile OpenAPI specifications. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Micrometer
The first release candidate of Micrometer Metrics 1.16.0 delivers dependency upgrades and two new features: the ability to declare dynamic key values, through a new annotation, @ObservedKeyValueTag, for use with the Observation interface created by an instance of the ObservedAspect class; and validation of low cardinality keys on observations that have the same name. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
The first release candidate of Micrometer Tracing 1.6.0 features dependency upgrades to Micrometer Metrics 1.16.0-RC1 and OpenTelemetery Instrumentation 2.20.1. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Project Reactor
The first release candidate of Project Reactor 2025.0.0 provides dependency upgrades to reactor-core 3.8.0-RC1, reactor-netty 1.3.0-RC1, reactor-pool 1.2.0-RC1, reactor-addons 3.6.0-RC6 and reactor-kotlin-extensions 1.3.0-RC5. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Similarly, Project Reactor 2024.0.11, the eleventh maintenance release, provides dependency upgrades to reactor-core 3.7.12, reactor-netty 1.2.11, reactor-pool 1.1.5, and reactor-addons 3.5.4. There was also a realignment to version 2024.0.11 with the reactor-kotlin-extensions 1.2.4 and reactor-kafka 1.3.24 artifacts that remain unchanged. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Testcontainers
The release of Testcontainers for Java 2.0.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: expose a gRPC endpoint from an instance of the BigQueryEmulatorContainer class, defined under the gcloud folder, to align with that of the same class name defined in the containers folder, to provide access to an instance of the Google Cloud BigQueryWriteSettings class; and the addition of a getHttpUrl() method to the ClickHouseContainer class. More details on this release, including breaking changes, may be found in the release notes.
