Java News Roundup: TornadoVM 7.0, Groovy 6.0, GraalVM, Hibernate, Quarkus, Gradle, Maven

This week's Java roundup for September 21, 2026, covers several significant updates across various Java-related projects. GA releases of TornadoVM 7.0 and Groovy 6.0 were announced, along with point releases of GraalVM and Gradle, and maintenance releases of Quarkus and GDK for Micronaut. The seventh release candidate of Maven 4.0 and milestone releases of Micrometer Metrics and Tracing were also highlighted.

JEP 544, Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation, was elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 28, while JEP 546, Adaptive Heap Sizing for ZGC, and JEP 545, Faster Startup and Warmup with ZGC, were both elevated to Candidate status. Build 17 of the JDK 28 early-access builds was released, featuring fixes for various issues. Oracle Labs released GraalVM 25.4, including new compiler configuration optimizations and support for unsigned integer division and remainder operations by constant values.

Additionally, version 5.1.5 of the Graal Development Kit for Micronaut was released, aligning with Micronaut 5.1.5. TornadoVM 7.0.0, featuring a new TileContext class and bug fixes, was also released. The Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile is expected to be released before JakartaOne Livestream on December 1, with Jakarta EE developer advocate Ivar Grimstad providing updates.

Spring delivered milestone releases for Spring Boot, Batch, Security, AMQP, Integration, Data, Framework, GraphQL, and Kafka, as well as first milestone releases for Spring AI, Cloud, Web Services, and LDAP. Hibernate ORM 8.0 beta updates expanded support for Jakarta Persistence 4.0-M4 and introduced new @PostCreate and @PreClose annotations.