According to Oracle, many of the new features are follow-ups to previous features, adding new functionality or making improvements, and all are either preview or incubating features. 

Two language updates in Java 20 are the ability to nest record patterns and use pattern matching for switch expressions. 

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Oracle makes significant changes to its Java license

Eclipse Foundation finds significant momentum for open source Java this year

There are also three features that came from Project Loom, which is a project that explores ways to improve the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). A new incubating feature, scoped values, will enable sharing of immutable data within and across threads. Virtual threads are in their second preview, and these threads will significantly reduce effort associated with writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput concurrent applications. And finally structured concurrency treats multiple threads as a single unit, which will help streamline error handling and cancellation. 

The final grouping of updates comes from Project Panama, which is an initiative to improve connectivity between the JVM and native code. The foreign function and memory API will allow Java applications to call native libraries and process data without using the Java Native Interface, contributing to increased ease-of-use, performance, and safety. And the new Vector API is used to express vector computations that will compile at runtime. 

“For more than 25 years, Java has empowered developers to design and build the next generation of robust, scalable, and secure applications,” said Georges Saab, senior vice president of development, Java Platform and chair, OpenJDK Governing Board, Oracle. “The innovative new enhancements in Java 20 reflect the vision and invaluable efforts the global Java community has contributed throughout Java’s existence. With the support provided by Oracle’s ongoing Java technology leadership and community stewardship, Java has never been more relevant as a contemporary language and platform that helps developers improve productivity.”

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The move away from Oracle’s distribution has been quite significant. In fact, a 2022 New Relic survey found that Oracle’s share of the Java market had dropped from 75% in 2020 to 35% in 2022.

There are many alternatives —  both commercial and open-source — to the standard Oracle distribution, and in 2017, the Adoptium project (at the time it was called AdoptOpenJDK) was formed to promote high-quality builds of OpenJDK. The build provided by the Adoptium project is called Eclipse Temurin. 

According to the Eclipse Foundation and the Adoptium Working Group, in February 2023 there were over 12.3 million downloads of the Eclipse Temurin binaries, which is more than double what it had been the same time the previous year. 

“I think that really that growth year-over-year indicates the traction that it is getting amongst developers and enterprises that are looking for a robust, secure, high quality Java runtime,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. 

Eclipse Temurin is now the default Java option in GitHub Actions, which may be contributing to increased uptake as well. It’s also used in a number of container images, and the working group sees participation from major organizations like Bloomberg, Google, IBM, and Red Hat. 

The Eclipse Foundation speculates that Oracle’s licensing structure changes may be contributing to the increased interest as well. According to Tim Ellison, PMC lead for Eclipse Adoptium, the commercial versions now amount to a pretty significant part of the IT budget. 

“We need to make sure that there are robust alternatives and viable alternatives to that paid-for product,” said Ellison. “We can get that at a lower cost by supporting the open source communities that are producing a drop-in replacement and the direct replacement for that.”

Aside from the economics, the increased interest may also be an indicator that the open source community is building something better than the commercial offerings. 

“All of these very large companies are coming together, pooling their resources, and getting a multiplier effect on the downstream binary, which is a standardized product kind of by definition. “[And leads to a better product] for Java than any individual vendor can do,” said Ellison.

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“The new Java SE Universal Subscription was developed based on feedback from our customers with Java workloads running in increasingly diverse environments. It no longer requires customers to count every single Processor, Desktop, or Named User that may be using the subscription, and the permitted use is universal across desktop, servers, and cloud infrastructure,” said Mike Ringhofer, SVP of Worldwide Java Business at Oracle. 

Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul, which provides its own Java runtime, says this is a pretty dramatic change in how Java is licensed and supported. 

“It’s really one of the first times I’ve ever seen that the price you pay is completely decoupled from the value that you’re deriving from the software,” he said. 

Previously, though users may not have liked the price they were paying per core, at least it made sense in that the more you use, the more you pay, Sellers explained.

According to a blog post written by Neil Stewart, senior research director at IDC’s Sourcing Advisory Service, a company with a small number of installs but a lot of employees may be paying millions per year for this license.  

“As an example, a customer with 20,000 employees utilizing JAVA SE in any capacity under the new subscription terms would need to purchase JAVA SE Universal Subscriptions for all 20,000 Employees, at a monthly rate of $6.75, total $1.62M per annum,” he explained in the post.. 

According to a document released by Oracle, the monthly cost of each individual subscription is higher for smaller companies and lower for larger companies. For example, companies with less than 999 employees pay $15/employee/month, while a company with 40,000 to 49,000 employees will pay $5.25/employee/month. 

Though Oracle is the company behind Java, the releases it is putting out are just based on  OpenJDK, which is an open-source Java project. 

“It’s not like OpenJDK is some reimplementation of Java, and Oracle has all this secret sauce that they’re doing. No, it’s all one and the same,” said Sellers.

There are a number of other companies that provide enterprise support for Java based on OpenJDK, one of which is Azul. Based on a survey from New Relic last year, Oracle only held 34% of the market share of JDK distributions, which was still the biggest share, but much less than its 2020 share of 75%. Following behind Oracle at the time of the 2022 survey were Amazon at 22%, Eclipse Adoptium at 11%, Azul Systems at 8%, and Red Hat at 6%. 

“And so we already see a shift happening away from Oracle Java onto OpenJDK- based Java runtimes. There’s no doubt that this change will further accelerate that shift. There’s now even more motivation for developers to move to OpenJDK based distributions,” Sellers said. 

IDC’s Stewart echoed this, saying that in order to avoid higher costs, customers may need to look into third-party alternatives that meet their requirements. A good first step is to gather employee and partner counts and assess their processor requirements to determine what their costs might be. 

He also noted that because Oracle’s licensing terms are accepted when software is downloaded, companies not interested in taking part in the new licensing will need to set strict  controls on permission, access, download, and installation of Oracle Java. 

Sellers says this may entail having security teams block Oracle downloads and work with the security team to ensure there are no instances of it running in your organization. 

“All it takes is one copy of Oracle Java downloaded into your enterprise, and now you have the full financial liability of running that … I mean, if that happened before, okay, whenever Oracle comes in and audits me, I pay for the few rogue developers that accidentally downloaded Oracle Java. Now, it’s a totally different deal. The liability is significant,” he said.

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But still, it’s important to go over the additions in these last two releases.

Java 18 added nine new language enhancements, and Java 19 added seven. 

In Java 18, a new Simple Web Server was added that developers can use for prototyping and testing purposes. Chad Arimura, VP of developer relations at Oracle, explained that this addition continues on with the company’s efforts to make Java “more approachable for students and educators and developers that are just getting started in their careers.”

Developers can also add code snippets within API documentation to be able to provide better examples when documenting things. 

UTF-8 became the default charset for Java APIs, which means any APIs that are dependent on the default charset behave consistently on all implementations, operating systems, locales, and configurations.

Other features in Java 18 included method handling being made the underlying mechanism for reflection to reduce maintenance and development costs, and a new service-provider interface for host name and address resolution, enabling developers to use resolvers other than the built-in one. 

Features released in beta included a vector API, foreign function and memory API, pattern matching for switch expressions, and finalization is being prepared for removal in a future release and is currently deprecated.

Java 19 was the next major release, which came out in October. 

In that release, the most significant improvements to the language itself were the ability to nest record patterns and pattern matching for switch expressions, both of which are currently in preview. The record patterns update extends pattern matching and allows for more composable data queries. Pattern matching for switch expressions allows an expression to be tested against multiple patterns.

Library tool updates included an API for invoking foreign functions and accessing foreign memory safely, and a new Vector API that allows applications to express vector computations that compile at runtime to vector instructions.

New features that came out of Project Loom, which is an initiative to provide a lightweight concurrency model for Java, include virtual threads, which reduce the effort of writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput concurrent applications, and structured concurrency, which simplifies multithreaded programming. 

The Linux/RISC-V Port was also integrated into the JDK mainline repository in that release. 

“Our ongoing collaboration with the developer community is the lifeblood of Java. As the steward of Java, Oracle is steadfastly committed to providing developers and enterprises with the latest tools to help them create innovative apps and services,” said Georges Saab, senior vice president of development for the Java Platform and chair of the OpenJDK Governing Board at Oracle, at the time of the release. “The powerful new enhancements in Java 19 are a testament to the monumental work across the global Java community.”

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According to the company, CI Fuzz CLI leverages genetic and evolutionary algorithms along with automated instrumentation in order to generate multiple unusual inputs to test applications for unplanned behaviors that can result in a crash, Denial of Service, or Zero-Day exploits.

“With the CI Fuzz CLI, Java developers can now improve the overall security and robustness of their applications with confidence and ease. It takes just three commands to set up and run a fuzz test. The tool comes with ready-to-use integrations for Maven, Gradle and Bazel. With a JUnit setup in place, developers can even run fuzz tests directly from their IDE,” said Werner Krahe, product director at Code Intelligence. “If you’re completely new to fuzzing, I recommend starting with a simple test setup. Use your pre-existing unit tests as a template to run local fuzz tests on small libraries and utils. After a while, you could take it further and apply it to more complex testing setups. Ultimately, fuzz testing will provide the best results when running continuously in your CI/CD.”

The new open-source tool is intended to tackle the current challenges that come with fuzz testing, such as a lack of understanding and challenges with implementation, by making fuzz testing accessible for developers directly from their command line or IDE.

Additionally, CI Fuzz CLI offers users continuous application security testing directly in the CI/CD process by introducing new fuzzing capabilities for Java. 

“Code Intelligence helps developers ship secure software by providing the necessary integrations to test their code at each pull request, without ever having to leave their favorite environment. It’s like having an automated security expert always by your side,” said Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub.

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The company stated that these offerings are intended to address the growing demand for more efficient, secure, and supported Java software that performs well as well as reduces cloud computing costs.

According to the company, the Alpaquita Cloud Native Platform is a compilation of a new Alpaquita Linux with other BellSoft tools that works to empower container-based software development.

“Our mission at BellSoft is to deliver the most complete Java experience to developers and IT managers. We are passionately committed to the modernization of Java for a cloud-native world, and we believe the best way to achieve this is through open source collaboration, and it’s why we are one of the top contributors to OpenJDK,” said Alex Belokrylov, CEO and co-founder of BellSoft. “With today’s introduction of the Alpaquita Cloud Native Platform and Alpaquita Linux  we are extending our leadership in the Java community to address pain points around efficiency and cost, so developers can focus on creating innovative, scalable, cloud-native applications.”

Additionally, Alpaquita Linux is a Linux distribution tuned specifically for a Java runtime. Based on Alpine Linux, it offers users performance and security enhancements as well as a smaller size and improved flexibility. 

Currently the Alpaquita Cloud Native Platform is available in multiple different packages for developers and development teams. 

For more information, visit the website

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“This release is the ‘big one’ that plants Jakarta EE firmly in the modern era of microservices and containers,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The release of Jakarta EE 10 reflects the work of a global community of contributors, with leadership from vendors such as Fujitsu, IBM, Oracle, Payara, and Tomitribe. Jakarta EE has already helped breathe new life into enterprise Java, but with this release it has now delivered key innovations for the cloud-native era, which are critical to the future of our industry.” 

The new versions provide new functionality in over 20 component specifications through version updates. This includes Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) 4.0, which offers Jakarta RESTful Web Services 3.1 and  standardizes a Java SE Bootstrap API. Also new is   Jakarta Security 3.0 with support for OpenID Connect and new functions in Jakarta Persistence queries.  Developers can also create Jakarta Faces Views with pure Java. 

According to a news release from open-source application server provider Payara, Jakarta EE 10 is the first major release of Jakarta EE since the major namespace update, brought by Jakarta EE 9. 

With Jakarta EE 9, the package namespace javax moved to jakarta across the Jakarta EE 9 Platform, Web Profile specifications, and related TCKs. “With Jakarta EE 10, we see the first release in the new namespace that also adds functionality for the Jakarta EE user,” the company wrote in its announcement. “The baseline Java JDK used is also changing, from Java 8 to Java 11 at API level, and Java 17 for runtimes. For Jakarta EE 8 users moving to Jakarta EE 10, all Jakarta EE imports in the code will need to be changed to the new namespace.’

For example, the release noted, for messaging, javax.jms must become jakarta.jms; Java Persistence, heavily used in Hibernate and Spring, must move from javax.persistence to jakarta.persistence, etc.

Also, Payara said, new Java SE Features can now be used with Jakarta EE 10; some of these are Completable Future, Fork/Join pools, and better integration with new technologies like OpenID. Payara Community users will be able to make use of these changes straightaway, thanks to Jakarta 10-compatible Payara 6 Community Alpha 4.

Meanwhile, the new Core Profile offers Jakarta EE specifications that target smaller runtimes for microservices development, including a new CDI-Lite specification that enables compiling to native by providing build-compatible extensions.  

Developers can now develop and deploy Jakarta EE 10 applications on Java SE 11 and SE 17 and take advantage of new features from SE 9 and SE 11. They also have access to simplified application development through the broader use of additional annotations.

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The most significant improvements to the language itself are the ability to nest record patterns and pattern matching for switch expressions, both of which are currently in preview. The record patterns update extends pattern matching and allows for more composable data queries. Pattern matching for switch expressions allows an expression to be tested against multiple patterns.

New library tool updates include an API for invoking foreign functions and safely accessing foreign memory, which enables Java programs to call native libraries and process native data using a Java development model. A new Vector API allows Java programs to express vector computations that compile at runtime to vector instructions. 

Project Loom, which is an attempt to provide a lightweight concurrency model for Java, has also resulted in a few new features. Virtual threads significantly reduce the effort of writing, maintaining, and observing high-throughput concurrent applications. Structured concurrency will simplify multithreaded programming by treating multiple tasks running in different threads as a single unit. 

And finally, the Linux/RISC-V Port has been integrated into the JDK mainline repository, which will make Linux/RISC-V implementations easier in the future.

“Our ongoing collaboration with the developer community is the lifeblood of Java. As the steward of Java, Oracle is steadfastly committed to providing developers and enterprises with the latest tools to help them create innovative apps and services,” said Georges Saab, senior vice president of development for the Java Platform and chair of the OpenJDK Governing Board at Oracle. “The powerful new enhancements in Java 19 are a testament to the monumental work across the global Java community.”

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Some Visual Studio Code users had been reporting to Microsoft that when they have Lombok dependencies in their projects, some extensions wouldn’t work as they are supposed to. After investigating this issue, Microsoft made the issue to provide built-in support for the library so that developers wouldn’t have these issues. 

The company also enabled a Drag and Drop feature in the Java Project Explorer view. This will allow developers to do things like drag a class from one package to another, drag a package into another package, and drag a JAR file from the operating system to a Java project. 

It also added a way to hide Inlay Hints under certain circumstances. Inlay Hints is a feature that was introduced in April and it shows hints about the parameter names for unfamiliar methods. Microsoft said that most developers liked this feature but that there were cases in which they didn’t want it to appear. 

Another feature that has been added is the ability to set a function breakpoint when debugging. Execution will be paused at the breakpoint and the debugger will provide details about the context of the execution. 

Microsoft also continues to make Spring improvements. This month the feature they are highlighting is the bean dependency view. Beans are objects that are managed by a Spring IoC container. Developers will now be able to see what a bean is injected into or what it depends on. 

More information about the July updates for Java in Visual Studio Code is available in this blog post. 

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“Our goal is to meet the needs of both the Eclipse community and broader runtime users by providing a comprehensive set of technologies around runtimes for Java applications that operate alongside existing standards, infrastructures, and cloud platforms,” the project’s website states. 

It is a continuation of the AdoptOpenJDK project which started in 2017.

Eclipse Adoptium also provides an experimentation platform for developers, academics, and researchers who can use it to try out new runtime, build, test, and infrastructure ideas. 

Earlier this week, the Eclipse Foundation and the Adoptium Working Group announced the launch of the Adoptium Marketplace. 

The marketplace offers an easy way for developers to get Java SE TCK-certified and AQAvit tested binaries through a centralized site that the Eclipse Foundation manages. Eclipse AQAvit is a project that was created to test criteria that determines if a binary is ready for production. 

Working group members will be able to promote their own Java SE releases through the marketplace if they meet those quality standards. 

“With the increasing volume and diversity of OpenJDK runtime distributions, it’s become clear that quality and consistency across the ecosystem must be established,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The creation of the Adoptium Marketplace provides a vendor-neutral home for the Java ecosystem that makes it incredibly easy for anyone to find Java SE compatible binaries that have been extensively tested and are ready for cloud native and enterprise deployments.”

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