Java News Roundup: JDK 26, LibericaJDK, Payara Platform, GlassFish Milestone, ClawRunr

This week's Java roundup for March 16th, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA release of JDK 26; LibericaJDK 26; the March 2026 edition of the Payara Platform; the first milestone release of GlassFish 9.0; a point release of Micronaut; and introducing ClawRunr, a new Java-based personal AI assistant created by JobRunr.

JDK 26 GA Release

Oracle has released version 26 of the Java programming language and virtual machine, which ships with a final feature set of 10 JEPs. This General Availability release represents the culmination of months of development and community feedback. Developers can now access the production-ready JDK 26 through Oracle's official channels.

The release includes several significant enhancements to the Java language and platform. While specific JEP details weren't provided in the roundup, JDK 26 continues Java's trajectory of improving developer productivity, performance, and security. Organizations planning their upgrade strategies should review the release notes to understand the breaking changes and new features that may impact their applications.

For those interested in the development timeline, JDK 27 Build 14 of the early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 13 that include fixes for various issues. The early-access program allows developers to test upcoming features and provide feedback before the official release. For both JDK 26 and JDK 27, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database, ensuring the platform continues to improve through community involvement.

Spring Framework Milestone Releases

It was a busy week over at Spring as the various teams have delivered the third milestone releases of: Spring Boot; Spring Security; Spring Integration; Spring AI; and Spring AMQP; along with the second milestone releases of Spring Data and Spring for Apache Kafka. These milestone releases indicate active development toward the next stable versions of these popular Spring projects.

Milestone releases are crucial for the Spring ecosystem as they allow developers to test new features, APIs, and improvements before final release. The Spring teams typically use this phase to gather feedback and identify any issues that need addressing. Organizations considering adopting new Spring features should evaluate these milestone releases in their development environments to assess compatibility and performance characteristics.

LibericaJDK 26 Release

BellSoft has released their downstream distribution of OpenJDK, Liberica JDK 26. Of the overall 2,825 fixes (2,665 in OpenJDK and 160 in JavaFX), BellSoft had contributed nine fixes to this release. This demonstrates the company's active participation in the OpenJDK community while providing a commercially supported distribution.

Liberica JDK offers several advantages for enterprise deployments, including long-term support options, optimized builds for different platforms, and additional tooling not found in the standard OpenJDK distribution. Developers may download this latest version from BellSoft's website, where they can also find information about support options and platform-specific builds.

GlassFish 9.0 Milestone Release

The first milestone release of GlassFish 9.0.0 delivers full milestone 1 implementations of Jakarta Security 5.0, Jakarta Faces 5.0, and Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 5.0. This release also includes partial milestone 1 implementations of Jakarta Servlet 6.2 and Jakarta Concurrency 3.2. GlassFish 9.0.0 targets Jakarta EE 12, aligning with the latest enterprise Java specifications.

Milestone releases are essential for the GlassFish community as they provide early access to new Jakarta EE features and allow developers to test compatibility with their applications. The partial implementations indicate that some specifications are still under active development, and users should expect additional features and refinements in subsequent releases.

Payara Platform March 2026 Edition

Payara has released their March 2026 edition of the Payara Platform that includes Community Edition 7.2026.3, Enterprise Edition 6.36.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.85.0. Along with bug fixes and component upgrades, all three editions ship with resolutions to numerous memory leaks that include the PayloadFilesManager, InputJarArchive and LogFileHandle classes.

Memory leak resolutions are particularly significant for enterprise applications, as they directly impact application stability and resource utilization. The Payara team's focus on these issues demonstrates their commitment to platform reliability. Modernization of the platform continues with this release as support for legacy deployment descriptor formats and the built-in JVM profiler configuration have been deprecated.

The release also removes over 27 deprecated command parameters, including restore-domain, create-cluster and delete-cluster. These removals streamline the platform and encourage adoption of newer, more efficient approaches to application management. Organizations upgrading should review the release notes for Community Edition 7.2026.3, Enterprise Edition 6.36.0 and Enterprise Edition 5.85.0 to understand the impact of these changes.

Micronaut Framework 4.10.10 Security Update

The Micronaut Foundation has released version 4.10.10 of the Micronaut Framework, based on Micronaut Core 4.10.18. This release features bug fixes, a patch update to the Micronaut Test module, and resolutions to two denial-of-service attacks.

The first vulnerability was related to the expandArrayToThreshold() method, defined in the JsonBeanPropertyBinder class, not correctly handling a descending array index order during form body binding with application/x-www-form-urlencoded. This could potentially allow attackers to consume excessive server resources through carefully crafted requests.

The second vulnerability was related to the DefaultHtmlErrorResponseBodyProvider class using an instance of the Java ConcurrentHashMap class with no eviction policy. Without proper eviction, this could lead to memory exhaustion under certain conditions. These security fixes highlight the importance of keeping frameworks updated and demonstrate the Micronaut team's responsiveness to potential threats.

ClawRunr: Java-Based Personal AI Assistant

The team at JobRunr has introduced a Java-based personal AI assistant, ClawRunr, a runtime built on JDK 25, Spring Boot 4, Spring AI and JobRunr. ClawRunr runs on a user's local hardware and performs such tasks as: communicate through a web interface; schedule tasks, browse the web; and read email.

Inspiration came from OpenClaw, a personal AI assistant implemented in Node.js. The Java implementation represents an interesting alternative approach, potentially offering better integration with existing Java enterprise systems and applications. By running on local hardware, ClawRunr addresses privacy concerns that some users have with cloud-based AI assistants.

The use of Spring Boot 4 and Spring AI indicates that ClawRunr leverages modern Java frameworks for rapid development and AI integration. JobRunr's involvement suggests that the assistant may include sophisticated job scheduling and background processing capabilities, given the company's expertise in this area.

InfoQ will follow up with a more detailed news story on ClawRunr, which should provide deeper insights into its architecture, capabilities, and potential use cases for developers and organizations.