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This week’s Java roundup for May 19th, 2025 features news highlighting: Java’s 30th birthday; the release of Hibernate ORM 7.0 and Hibernate Validator 9.0; the May 2025 edition of Open Liberty; the first beta release of JobRunr 8.0; and the introduction of Embabel, jaz, and Eclipse DataGrid.

Happy 30th Birthday, Java!

On May 23rd, 1995 at the Sun World conference in San Francisco, California, Sun Microsystems formally introduced the Java programming language. Oracle marked this milestone with their 30th Birthday Event, hosted by Java Developer Advocates, Ana-Maria Mihalceanu, Billy Korando and Nicolai Parlog along with Sharat Chander, Senior Director, Product Management & Developer Engagement at Oracle. This special six-hour event featured many guests on a variety of topics. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

OpenJDK

With Rampdown Phase One scheduled for June 5, 2025, the following JEPs have been elevated from Proposed to Target to Targeted for JDK 25:

Similarly, the following JEPs have been elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 25:

The reviews for the JEPs that have been Proposed to Target are expected to conclude by Tuesday, May 27, 2025.

Version 7.5.2 of the Regression Test Harness for the JDK, jtreg, has been released and ready for integration in the JDK. The most significant changes include: support for using the ${test.main.class} template to use the current class name for test actions; the ability to configure the default timeout value in jtreg tests via a properties file; and support for .jasm and .jcod files in patched Java modules. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

JDK 25

Build 24 of the JDK 25 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 23 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

For JDK 25, 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 11 and Jakarta EE 12, writing:

The Jakarta EE 11 TCK is very close to being finalized, so it looks like we are on the path of getting the Jakarta EE 11 Platform release out the door in the middle of June.

The work with Jakarta EE 12 is on track according to the Jakarta EE 12 Release Plan. Plan reviews have been completed, and discussions right now are around which specifications to add (if any) to the Platform, and which to possibly deprecate.

The road to Jakarta EE 11 included five milestone releases, the release of the Core Profile in December 2024, the release of Web Profile in April 2025, and a first release candidate of the Platform before its anticipated GA release in June 2025.

Spring Framework

It was a busy week over at Spring as the various teams have delivered GA releases of Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Authorization Server, Spring Session, Spring Integration, Spring for GraphQL, Spring AI and Spring Web Services. Further details may be found in this InfoQ news story.

The Spring Data team has introduced their plan to lower the barrier to entry related to the different approaches with technologies (GraalVM, CRaC, CDS, etc.) that reduce application startup times. With the upcoming release of Spring Data 2025.1 (AKA version 4.0), repositories will be migrating to Ahead-of-Time compilation. This means they will be shifting all the “repository preparations that are done at application startup to build time.” This may be accomplished by setting the spring.aot.repositories.enabled property to true.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft has introduced their new Azure Command Launcher for Java, named jaz, to address “suboptimal resource utilization in cloud-based deployments, where memory and CPU tend to be dedicated for application workloads (use of containers and VMs) but still require intelligent management to maximize efficiency and cost-effectiveness.” This means that instead of writing:

    
$ JAVA_OPTS="-XX:... several JVM tuning flags"
$ java $JAVA_OPTS -jar myapp.jar"
    

Developers can now write:

    
$ jaz -jar myapp.jar
    

jaz is currently in private preview and requests for access may be made here.

Open Liberty

IBM has released version 25.0.0.5 of Open Liberty featuring bug fixes and the ability for the MicroProfile Telemetry 2.0 (mpTelemetry-2.0) feature to collect and send Open Liberty HTTP access logs, such as export traces, metrics, and logs, to OpenTelemetry.

Quarkus

The Quarkus team has announced that Quarkus MCP Server 1.2.0 now supports streamable HTTP, along with the stdio and SSE transports, that make it possible to connect mobile applications and cloud services to MCP servers. While this is considered a full implementation, the Quarkus team plans future releases to include resumability and redelivery.

Hibernate

The release of Hibernate ORM 7.0.0.Final delivers new features such as: a new QuerySpecification interface that provides a common set of methods for all query specifications that allow for iterative, programmatic building of a query; and a migration from Hibernate Commons Annotations (HCANN) to the new Hibernate Models project for low-level processing of an application domain model. There is also support for the Jakarta Persistence 3.2 specification, the latest version targeted for Jakarta EE 11. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and the migration guide.

The release of Hibernate Validator 9.0.0.Final provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: new constraints, @KorRRN and @BitcoinAddress, annotations that check for a valid Korean resident registration number and a well-formed BTC (Bitcoin) Mainnet address, respectively; and a new BOM that provides dependency management for all of the published artifacts. This release is the compatible implementation of the Jakarta Validation 3.1 specification.

Details on both of these releases may be found in this blog post by Gavin King, Senior Distinguished Engineer at IBM and creator of Hibernate.

Embabel Agent Framework

Rod Johnson, former CEO at Atomist and father of the Spring Framework, has introduced the Embabel Agent Framework for the JVM written in Kotlin. As described by Johnson:

It introduces some ideas that I think are novel: a planning step using a non-LLM AI algorithm; and a rich domain model that can expose behavior as LLM tools as well as in Java or Kotlin code.

Embabel was built on Spring and offers a full MCP integration with Spring AI. InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story.

JobRunr

The first beta release of JobRunr 8.0.0 features: ahead-of-time scheduled recurring jobs where JobRunr schedules a recurring job as soon as the previous run is finished; and support for Kotlin serialization with a new KotlinxSerializationJsonMapper class, an implementation of the JsonMapper interface, for an improved experience when writing JobRunr applications in Kotlin. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

Eclipse DataStore

The Eclipse Foundation and Microstream have introduced a new open-source project, Eclipse DataGrid, designed to be a pure Java in-memory data processing layer for distributed EclipseStore applications. As a result, Microstream will open-source their in-memory data platform and transfer the codebase to Eclipse DataGrid. Features include: a distributed Java object graph model; seamless integration with the Java Streams API; and integration with Apache Lucene and Kubernetes.