JDK 27 ships as Azul Payara, Ktor, and Netflix's new JMS CLI tool debut

Oracle has officially released JDK 27, marking the culmination of work across a nine-feature roadmap. The latest version arrives as the ecosystem continues to mature with concurrent releases from downstream vendors and complementary projects.

Core Platform Updates#

Beyond the headline JDK 27 release, development continues on JDK 28 with Build 16 now available in early access. Developers are invited to test the new functionality and report issues through the Java Bug Database. BellSoft's Liberica JDK 27 distribution has also shipped, incorporating 2,387 fixes from the main OpenJDK codebase plus 155 refinements to JavaFX, with three contributions from BellSoft itself.

Jakarta EE and Application Servers Advance#

The Jakarta EE roadmap has crystallized further. The Core Profile specification targets a December 2026 release, with the Web Profile and Platform editions following in the first and second quarters of 2027. Community input is being sought on whether to include Jakarta NoSQL 1.1 in the Jakarta EE 12 release. The Starter for Jakarta EE website has also been redesigned to match the visual direction of the main Jakarta EE site.

Azul has released Payara 7.4.0 (along with compatible Enterprise editions 6.42.0 and 5.91.0), bringing support for MicroProfile 7.1 and, importantly, integration with the new Jakarta Agentic AI specification in Payara Micro and Payara Embedded. The release addresses a Jackson Databind vulnerability (CVE-2026-68497) that could enable denial-of-service attacks. A breaking change removes deprecated MicroProfile OpenTracing support in favor of OpenTelemetry instrumentation.

Developer Tools and Ecosystem Maturity#

JetBrains Ktor 3.6.0 streamlines OAuth2 integration by adding automated OpenID Connect discovery and a dedicated plugin to reduce implementation complexity. JHipster 9.4.0 expands testing options with Playwright support alongside Cypress, migrates Angular microfrontend builds from webpack Module Federation to esbuild and Native Federation, and reimplements R2DBC repositories on Spring Data R2DBC foundations.

Open J Proxy reaches 1.0.0 general availability after partnering with OmniFish in January 2026. The JDBC connection pool now features local caching for metadata operations, configurable leak detection thresholds, and full JDBC Type 3 driver compliance. BoxLang 1.17.0 introduces a Module Inception feature for nested module management, a module syntax checker command, and encryption support for sensitive configuration values.