Java News Roundup: JHipster 9.0, Project Valhalla, Spring, Helidon, OpenXava, Java Operator SDK

This week's Java roundup for March 9th, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA release of JHipster 9.0; Build 27-jep401ea of Project Valhalla; point releases of Spring Tools, Helidon, OpenXava and Java Operator SDK; a maintenance release of Spring Framework; the beta release of the March 2026 edition of Open Liberty; and milestone releases of Micrometer Metrics and Micrometer Tracing.

JDK 26 and JDK 27 Progress

JDK 26 Build 35 remains the current build in the JDK 26 early-access builds. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

JDK 27 Build 13 of the JDK 27 early-access builds was made available this past week featuring updates from Build 12 that include fixes for various issues. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.

For JDK 26 and JDK 27, developers are encouraged to report bugs via the Java Bug Database.

Project Valhalla Advances

Build 27-jep401ea3+1-1 of the Project Valhalla early-access builds was made available to the Java community and is based on an incomplete version of JDK 27. This project is focused on implementing JEP 401, Value Classes and Objects (Preview), currently in Submitted status. More details may be found in the feature documentation and specification changes.

Spring Framework Updates

Versions 7.0.6 and 6.2.17 of Spring Framework have been released to deliver bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as:

• Extra resource handling checks added to the ScriptTemplateView class through the ResourceHandlerUtils class to align with static resource handling
• A restoration of tests, ScriptTemplateViewTests in WebFlux and ScriptTemplateViewTests in WebMVC, that were inadvertently deleted in a previous release

Further details on these releases may be found in the release notes for version 7.0.6 and version 6.2.17.

Spring Tools 5.1.0 Release

The release of Spring Tools 5.1.0 delivers:

• Alignment with the Eclipse IDE 2026-03
• Support for JEP 483, Ahead-of-Time Class Loading & Linking, that reduces language server startup time
• Support for automatic conversion of JDBC queries that now use JEP 378, Text Blocks, for improved readability

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

JHipster 9.0.0 GA Release

After three beta releases, the GA release of JHipster 9.0.0 ships with notable changes that include:

• A minimal version of JDK 21 with support for JDK 25
• An alignment with Spring Boot 4.0
• An upgrade to React 19
• A replacement of the reactstrap module with react-bootstrap
• Support for Gradle 9.4.0 and Angular 21

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

Helidon 4.4.0 Release

The release of Helidon 4.4.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as:

• Improved support for OpenTelemetry that deprecates the Jaeger tracing provider in favor of the OpenTelemetry OTLP Exporter
• Experimental support for LangChain4j 1.11.0 with Agentic
• Enhancements to their JSON media that provides consistency for JSON providers that include Helidon JSON, Jackson, Jakarta JSON Processing and Jakarta JSON Binding

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

Open Liberty 26.0.0.3 Beta

The beta release of Open Liberty 26.0.0.3 delivers bug fixes and two new features:

• Updates to their Model Context Protocol Server 1.0 feature (mcpServer-1.0) that include new interfaces, ContentEncoder and ToolResponseEncoder, to provide more control when converting encoded responses to instances of Content and ToolResponse, respectively
• The ability to obtain the unique session-based request ID by using an instance of the RequestID record in tool method calls

Micrometer Metrics and Tracing Updates

The third milestone release of Micrometer Metrics 1.17.0 ships with bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as:

• A change to the toString() method, defined in the Request inner class of the OtlpMetricsSender interface, that removes the special characters from its response to be more human-readable
• A change to the PrometheusMeterRegistry class that allows for registering meters with the same name, but a different set of tag keys

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

The fourth milestone release of Micrometer Tracing 1.7.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and one new feature that removes the Micrometer Metrics BOM so that the Micrometer Tracing BOM can manage its own modules. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.

OpenXava 7.7.0 Release

The release of OpenXava 7.7.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as:

• A new AI chat assistant in all OpenXava modules that allow developers to query, filter, and modify data in a natural language
• New @NewView and @EditView annotations that allow for selecting and editing views, respectively, when creating new objects from references and collections

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

Java Operator SDK 5.3.0 Release

The release of Java Operator SDK 5.3.0, a Kubernetes operator framework for Java, ships with notable changes such as:

• Improvements to the ResourceOperations class that now guarantees a read-after-write operation and event filtering after updates
• A new MicrometerMetricsV2 class that scopes metrics to a controller instead of individual resources with a cardinality growth that can become unbounded as resources are added and deleted

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

About the Author

Michael Redlich has been an active member within the Java community for the past 25 years. He founded the Garden State Java User Group (formerly the ACGNJ Java Users Group) in 2001 that remains in continuous operation. Since 2016, Mike has served as a Java community news editor for InfoQ where his contributions include monthly news items, technical writing and technical reviews. He has presented at venues such as Oracle Code One, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, Trenton Computer Festival (TCF), TCF IT Professional Conference, and numerous Java User Groups. Mike serves as a committer on the Jakarta NoSQL and Jakarta Data specifications and participates on the leadership council of the Jakarta EE Ambassadors. He was named a Java Champion in April 2023. With 33-1/2 years service, Mike recently retired from ExxonMobil Technology & Engineering in Clinton, New Jersey with experience in developing custom scientific laboratory and web applications. He also has experience as a Technical Support Engineer at Ai-Logix, Inc. (now AudioCodes) where he provided technical support and developed telephony applications for customers.