Java News Roundup: JDK 27-RC1, OpenJDK JEPs, Jakarta EE, BellSoft, Helidon, Micrometer, Tika 4.0

Java News Roundup: JDK 27-RC1, OpenJDK JEPs, Jakarta EE, BellSoft, Helidon, Micrometer, Tika 4.0 - InfoQ

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Java News Roundup: JDK 27-RC1, OpenJDK JEPs, Jakarta EE, BellSoft, Helidon, Micrometer, Tika 4.0

Aug 25, 2026 5 min read

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• Michael Redlich

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This week's Java roundup for August 17th, 2026, features news highlighting: the first release candidate of JDK 27; JEP 541 and JEP 540 targeted for JDK 28; the GA release of Apache Tika 4.0; a maintenance release of Helidon; the first milestone releases of Micrometer Metrics 1.18 and Micrometer Tracing 1.8; an update on Jakarta EE 12; and BellSoft Critical Security Patch Updates.

#### OpenJDK

JEP 541, Deprecate the macOS/x64 Port for Removal , has been elevated from Proposed to Target to Targeted for JDK 28. This JEP proposes to deprecate the macOS/x64 port as Apple no longer supports this architecture. Similar to JEP 449, Deprecate the Windows 32-bit x86 Port for Removal , the intent to remove this port in a future release to save on maintenance costs.

JEP 540, Simple JSON API (Incubator) , has also been elevated from Proposed to Target to Targeted for JDK 28. This JEP defines a simple, standard API for parsing and generating JSON documents without the need for an external library. This feature implements RFC 8259, The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Data Interchange Format , and supersedes JEP 198, Light-Weight JSON API , which is now closed and withdrawn.

JEP 542, PEM Encodings of Cryptographic Objects , has been elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 28. This JEP proposes to finalize this feature after three rounds of preview delivered in JDK 25 through JDK 27. This feature offers " an API for encoding objects that represent cryptographic keys, certificates, and certificate revocation lists into the widely-used Privacy-Enhanced Mail (PEM) transport format, and for decoding from that format back into objects. " This JEP will support conversions between PEM text and cryptographic objects in PKCS #8 and X.509 binary formats. Changes include: a reclassification of the PEM record class to a regular class as a convenience for providing constructors that accept Base64-encoded content in byte arrays; and a rename of the DEREncodable interface to BinaryEncodable to more accurately describe the binary data stored in PEM text. The review is expected to conclude on Wednesday, August 26, 2026 .

#### JDK 28

Build 12 of the JDK 28 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 11 that include fixes for various issues . More details on this release may be found in the release notes .

#### JDK 27

Build 35 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 34 that include fixes for various issues . Further details on this release may be found in the release notes .

As per the JDK 27 release schedule , Mark Reinhold , chief architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle, formally declared that JDK 27 has entered its first release candidate as there are no unresolved P1 bugs in Build 35. The anticipated GA release is scheduled for September 15, 2026 and will include this final set of nine features:

• JEP 523: Make G1 the Default Garbage Collector in All Environments

• JEP 527: Post-Quantum Hybrid Key Exchange for TLS 1.3

• JEP 531: Lazy Constants (Third Preview)

• JEP 532: Primitive Types in Patterns, instanceof, and switch (Fifth Preview)

• JEP 533: Structured Concurrency (Seventh Preview)

• JEP 534: Compact Object Headers by Default

• JEP 536: JFR In-Process Data Redaction

• JEP 537: Vector API (Twelfth Incubator)

• JEP 538: PEM Encodings of Cryptographic Objects (Third Preview)

For JDK 28 and JDK 27 , 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:

The goal of releasing Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile in time for JakartaOne Livestream 2026 seems to be on track. In parallel with this, the Jakarta EE Platform project is starting to pay closer attention to the specifications of the Web Profile and the Platform itself. Their release target is in the first half of next year.

The Jakarta Agentic AI 1.0 specification, whose creation was approved in early November 2025, recently delivered a M1 release and a new project website .

#### BellSoft

Concurrent with Oracle's Critical Security Patch Update (CSPU) for August 2026, BellSoft has released CPU patches for versions 26.0.2.1, 25.0.4.1, 21.0.12.1, 17.0.20.1, 11.0.32.1, 8u504 7u513 and 6u513 of Liberica JDK , their downstream distribution of OpenJDK, to address this list of CVEs .

With an overall total of 29 fixes and backports, BellSoft states they have participated in eliminating 11 issues in all releases.

#### Helidon

The release of Helidon 4.5.3 delivers dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: authentication of participant callbacks using non-Jakarta RESTful Web Services in the Long Running Actions (LRA) component that now require developers to configure the mp.lra.participant.url and lra.participant.non-jax-rs.callback-auth.secret properties; and a limit set to 1000 nested object and array structures when processing JSON documents in the JSON Processing component. More details on this release may be found in the release notes .

#### Micrometer

The first milestone release of Micrometer Metrics 1.18.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: an optimization of the PrometheusMeterRegistry and MicrometerCollector classes for improved collection of metrics; and ignore registration of JCache meters when statistics are not enabled. This release also eliminates the use of the OpenTelemetry Protobuf Definitions in favor of the OpenTelemetry Metrics SDK and OTLP Exporter with shading. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes .

The first milestone release of Micrometer Tracing 1.8.0 provides: dependency upgrades to Micrometer Metrics 1.18.0-M1 and OpenTelemetery Instrumentation 2.30.0; and a refactor of the W3CPropagation class for improved security against malicious injections, denial of service attacks and OutOfMemory exceptions. More details on this release may be found in the release notes .

#### Apache Tika

The release of Apache Tika 4.0.0 delivers new features such as: a new MarkdownParser class, that generates structured, lossless XHTML output, to complement the ToMarkdownContentHandler class; and new inference and OCR modules that support Claude, Gemini, OpenAI and Tesseract OCR .

Breaking changes include: document parsing now runs in its own forked process; a migration from XML to JSON for configuration; and a rename of metadata keys, under the tk: prefix, for consistency.

Further details on this release may be found in the release notes .

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