This week's Java roundup for June 29th, 2026, features news highlighting: a new JEP candidate, Strict Field Initialization; point releases of GraalVM, JReleaser, RefactorFirst and Java Operator SDK; maintenance releases of GlassFish and Micronaut; the second milestone release of Grails 8.0; and the beta release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.7.
OpenJDK
JEP 539, Strict Field Initialization in the JVM (Preview), has been elevated from its JEP Draft 8350458 to Candidate status. This JEP introduces strictly-initialized fields in the Java Virtual Machine that are required to be initialized before they are read. Therefore, default values such as 0 or null are never observed. This feature is available for use by compilers that emit class files.
JDK 27
Build 29 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 28 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
JDK 28
Build 5 of the JDK 28 early-access builds was also made available this past week featuring updates from Build 4 that include fixes for various issues. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
GlassFish
The release of GlassFish 7.1.1 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and improvements such as: a streamline of the isValidAnnotation() method, defined in the WeldUtils class, to fail-fast when there are no valid type names; and the isInterceptor() method, defined in the InjectionServicesImpl class, is now cached to bypass the more expensive route of traversing the annotation-hierarchy on the CDI injection path on every request.
This release also addresses four CVEs, two of which affect GlassFish versions 8.0.1, 8.0.0, 7.1.0 and 7.0.0-7.0.25:
- CVE-2026-2586, a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability that allows an attacker with access to the Administration Console to send malicious crafted requests to execute arbitrary operating system commands with the privileges of the application service user.
- CVE-2026-2587, also an RCE vulnerability in the server-side template rendering mechanism that allows an attacker to compromise the underlying host and enable capabilities such as reading/modifying data, executing arbitrary commands, persistence, and lateral movement.
Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
GraalVM
The release of GraalVM 25.1 ships with notable changes such as: a 3% reduction in the size of generated native images; support for using G1 GC in native images on macOS AArch64 (available only in Oracle GraalVM); and a total of 1500 libraries available in the GraalVM Reachability Metadata Repository for use by Native Build Tools. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this YouTube video.
Micronaut
The Micronaut Foundation has released version 5.0.3 of the Micronaut Framework based on Micronaut Core 5.0.4, featuring patch updates to modules: Micronaut AWS; Micronaut Data; Micronaut SQL Libraries; Micronaut R2DBC; and Micronaut Problem JSON; Micronaut Test and Micronaut Micrometer. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Open Liberty
The beta release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.7 provides notable changes such as: support for Jakarta Data 1.1-M3 featuring new capabilities that include stateful repositories, the new @First annotation, and the ability to use the ability to use the Restriction and Constraint interfaces as parameters in the @Find and @Delete annotations; and the ability to disable the /health endpoints from MicroProfile Health 4.0 when using a file-based health check mechanism.
JReleaser
The release of JReleaser 1.25.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for multiple archive formats using jlink and native-image that can simultaneously generate ZIP and TAR files; and a change in masking secrets from all asterisks to displaying the first and last character of the secret. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Grails
The second milestone release of Apache Grails 8.0.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and notable changes such as: ensure that a Grails transformation fails (via the GlobalGrailsClassInjectorTransformation class) if an incorrect directory is passed into a grails-core build; and improved virtual thread cleanup and isolation of the thread-bound framework state when using instances of the Java ThreadLocal class. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
RefactorFirst
Jim Bethancourt, Principal Software Consultant at Improving, has released version 0.0.0 of RefactorFirst, a utility that prioritizes the parts of an application that should be refactored. This release provides: an improvement calculating removal of a class relationship; the addition of object-oriented disharmony detectors as referenced from the book, "Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice;" and a migration from D3 to Vizdom for improved data visualization. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Java Operator SDK
The release of Java Operator SDK 5.4.0, a Kubernetes operator framework for Java, delivers notable changes such as: support for a shard selector, a Kubernetes-style label selector that is applied in addition to a normal label selector, to run multiple replicas; a new defaultFilters parameter added to the @ControllerConfiguration annotation to provide an option to disable default filter events; and new getSecondaryResource() and getSecondaryResourcesAsStream() methods, added to the Context interface, to look up a single secondary resource directly by name. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.