Oracle is releasing Java 26, the latest version of the world’s number one programming language and development platform.
According to Oracle, Java 26 (Oracle JDK 26) delivers thousands of improvements that boost developer productivity, simplify the language, and help developers integrate AI and cryptography functionality into their applications.
To help developers further streamline and enhance their development initiatives, Oracle is also announcing the new Java Verified Portfolio (JVP), which provides developers with a curated set of Oracle-supported tools, frameworks, libraries, and services, including commercial support for JavaFX, a Java-based UI framework, and Helidon, a Java framework for microservices.
In addition, Oracle intends to align Helidon’s release cadence with Java releases and propose Helidon as an OpenJDK project.
“Java has played an integral role as a foundational enterprise technology for more than 30 years, serving as the backbone of organizations’ application stacks and helping them build powerful, reliable, and secure applications and services,” said Georges Saab, senior vice president, Oracle Java Platform and chair, OpenJDK governing board. “The new features in Java 26 reflect Oracle’s commitment to helping customers harness AI and cryptography to build applications that accelerate business growth. With the introduction of JVP, developers can streamline their development projects using a trusted collection of Oracle-supported tools, including Helidon, which is a fast, lightweight Java framework for building high performance microservices and AI-enabled applications.”
Updates include:
JEP 522: G1 GC: Improve Throughput by Reducing Synchronization: Helps developers process more work in less time by improving memory efficiency. It reduces the synchronization between application and garbage collector threads, increasing throughput with the G1 garbage collector. By running faster and supporting more users without additional hardware, Java improves efficiency, lowers infrastructure costs, and delivers a smoother user experience.
JEP 516: Ahead-of-Time Object Caching with Any GC: Boosts developer productivity and resource efficiency by accelerating the start-up time for Java applications with any garbage collector (GC). It allows sequential loading of cached pre-initialized Java objects into memory from a neutral, GC-agnostic format.
JEP 500: Prepare to Make Final Mean Final: Helps developers improve application security and reliability by preventing unintended modifications, tampering, or accidental errors in critical business systems. It issues warnings about uses of deep reflection to mutate final fields and allows developers to mutate final fields where essential to avoid both current warnings and future restrictions.
JEP 517: HTTP/3 for the HTTP Client API: Helps developers increase productivity by making it easier to write code that interacts with HTTP servers. It updates the HTTP Client API to support the HTTP/3 protocol, enabling libraries and applications to interact with HTTP/3 servers with minimal code change.
JEP 526: Lazy Constants (Second Preview): Helps developers increase productivity and resource efficiency by offering greater flexibility in the timing of their initialization, which is particularly valuable for AI and data-driven applications.
JEP 525: Structured Concurrency (Sixth Preview): Helps developers improve the maintainability, reliability, and observability of multithreaded code, which is especially beneficial for improving the scalability and resilience of AI and cloud native workloads.
In addition to the 10 JEPs, Java 26 offers dozens of updates that help organizations enhance application security, reliability, and performance. With Java 26, organizations can now streamline secure encryption with industry-standard hybrid public key encryption (HPKE), future-proof their supply chains with post-quantum ready JAR signing, and benefit from improved support for global standards with updates to Unicode 17.0 and CLDR v48. In addition, enhanced controls for cryptographic algorithms and legacy keystores further strengthen security and compliance, which helps organizations modernize with confidence.
Application performance and reliability are improved through dozens of additional updates that lead to faster JVM startup, more efficient garbage collection, expanded C2 JIT compilation, and smarter heap management.
The features in the Java 26 release are a result of continuous collaboration between Oracle and members of the global Java developer community via OpenJDK and the Java Community Process (JCP). For more details on the features in Java 26, please read the Java 26 technical blog post.
For more information about this news, visit www.oracle.com.