Java Annotated Monthly – October 2026

September gave us plenty to talk about, with major releases and thought-provoking reads. Java 27 arrived, and JetBrains opened a new chapter in agentic development with the announcement of JetBrains Air, a system of products for agentic software development, followed by the EAP of JetBrains Air in IDEs. Marit van Dijk kicks off this edition with her favorite news of the month and a closer look at these highlights. Then comes our usual selection of news, tutorials, and community stories. Let’s dive in!

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Marit van Dijk

Marit van Dijk is a Java Champion and Developer Advocate at JetBrains with over 20 years of software development experience. She’s passionate about building great software with great people, and making developers’ lives easier.

Java 27 was released last month. Of course, we support it from day 1 in IntelliJ IDEA. You can read all about it in Java 27 in IntelliJ IDEA or watch the release stream if you missed it. Piotr Przybył and I updated our talk Learning modern Java the playful way and presented it at GOTO Copenhagen last week, where I was also on stage for two other sessions. This week, Piotr and I will be doing a Deep Dive version at Devoxx Belgium. Later this month you can find us at JDD and Hello Stavanger.

In other news, JetBrains Air was announced; one system for building software with agents. Please try out Air in the IDE and let us know what you think!

Igor Kulakov wrote a Logpoints Walkthrough on how to use Logpoints; a new debugging feature in IntelliJ IDEA. Anton Arhipov shows how to tie that all together. And Siva Prasad Reddy K announced a course Building with AI Agents From Idea to Production where he will teach you about agentic development with IntelliJ IDEA and Spring Boot.

Finally, we are starting to release the videos from IntelliJ IDEA Conf 2026 on the IntelliJ IDEA YouTube channel, or catch up on IntelliJ IDEA Tech Talks episodes.

Java News

Here’s what’s new in the Java world:

• Java News Roundup 1, 2, 3, 4
• The Arrival of Java 27!
• Java 27 in IntelliJ IDEA
• JDK 27 Security Enhancements
• Performance Improvements in JDK 27
• JDK 27 Runtime Updates Release Notes
• Java 27 Technically Within 2 Minutes
• Spring Office Hours Podcast: S5E23 – Java 27 Release Party with Billy Korando
• Java Next
• Just-In-Time Compilation for Java Performance: Recent and Ongoing Improvements
• Quality Outreach Heads-up – JDK 28: Rich JavaDoc Notes
• JEP targeted to JDK 28: 539: Strict Field Initialization in the JVM (Preview)
• JEP targeted to JDK 28: 541: Deprecate the macOS/x64 Port for Removal

Java Tutorials and Tips

Give your next coding session a head start with these practical guides:

• From Spec-Driven Development to Living Specifications in Java Projects
• Principles of Memory Management in Java

• IntelliJ IDEA Tech Talks:
  • Beyond Virtual Threads: Structured Concurrency – Balkrishna Rawool
  • Agent Client Protocol for Java Developers – Mark Pollack
  • Agentic Patterns and Tool Calling with Spring AI – Christian Tzolov
• Native Calls in IntelliJ Platform Plugins: JNA vs FFM
• Masking a JVM thread dump without breaking the analysis
• My Ten Year Quest to Evolve Java Collections Beyond Java Stream
• When Spec-Driven Development Pays Off
• Episode 68 “Operator Overloading with Type Classes” [AtA]
• Come for Java. Get a Whole Lot More.
• The Java 21 Doomsday Clock Countdown
• Async is the New `goto`- Rethinking Structured Concurrency – Wout Werkman
• Getting more out of Maven – Marit van Dijk and Andres Almiray
• Module Imports

Kotlin Corner

A little Kotlin inspiration? Right this way:

• Kotlin Developer Survey is ongoing
• KotlinConf 2027 is coming to Krakow
• The State of Kotlin in 2026 Report
• Companions to come

AI

Beyond the AI buzz, there’s plenty to explore:

• Beyond Prompting: Context Engineering for Production-Grade AI
• Rigorous Yet Sustainable Human Reviews in the AI Era
• Did Your AI Agent Run the Debugger? One JVM Bug, Two Agent Runs
• Building an Agentic Warehouse Management System — Part 1: Where AI Agents Add Value
• Building an Agentic Warehouse Management System — Part 2: Java and Spring AI
• Building an Agentic Warehouse Management System — Part 3: Tools, Decisions, and Actions
• How Figma Uses AI Agents for Security
• Making Your Data Ready for Agentic AI
• Platform Engineering in the Age of AI
• Debugging Is Invariant Discovery: What One Kafka Session Taught Us About AI Agents
• The Lifecycle of LLM-as-a-Judge: Building, Aligning, and Monitoring at Scale
• Independent Investigation of Hugging Face Incident Reveals How Agents Collaborated and Behaved
• Did Your AI Agent Ever Run a Debugger? One JVM Bug, Two Agent Runs
• How I Built an AI Assistant for My Career with Java, Spring AI, and MongoDB
• Can You Explain the Diff Your AI Agent Just Wrote?
• Tachyon MCP 1.0 is here!

Languages, Frameworks, Libraries, and Technologies

Your next useful discovery might be outside your usual stack:

• This Week in Spring – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Spring Office Hours Podcast: S5E21 – Pro Spring Boot 4 with Felipe Gutierrez
• Spring AI and TypeSafe Jev: Fast, Cheap, Structured Decisions
• Spring Office Hours Podcast: S5E21 – Pro Spring Boot 4 with Felipe Gutierrez
• Quarkus Insights #258: Quarkus Feature Flags
• Aggregation Optimization in MongoDB: Sorting With Indexes (Part 5)
• Kubernetes Promotes KYAML as a Safer, More Consistent Way to Work with Manifests
• A Bootiful Podcast: Netflix’s Paul Bakker
• Andrew Kelley Interview: Why He Built Zig, Banned AI Contributions, and Moved Zig off GitHub
• Context Is the New Code

Conferences and Events

Clear some space on your calendar for these conferences:

• Devoxx Belgium – Antwerp, Belgium, October 5-9; Come meet JetBrains people and learn the recent news at our booth.
• JavaCro – Rovinj, Croatia, October 11-14
• Dev2Next – Lone Tree, USA, October 12-15
• BaselOne – Basel, Switzerland, October 14-15
• {j}DD – Kraków, Poland, October 20-21; Join the session by Marit van Dijk.
• JCon USA – Atlanta, USA, October 26-29
• J On the Beach – Malaga, Spain, October 29-30

Culture and Community

Great software starts with people, and people have stories to tell:

• Personality Over Skillset: How Adam Wachtel Builds Engineering Teams
• You Can’t “Vibe Code” Love
• I don’t like LLMs
• Build your Agentic Harness is Out

And Finally…

One last detour before you go:

• Project Loom in IntelliJ IDEA: Virtual Threads, Scoped Values, and Structured Concurrency
• The Grails Plugin Has a New Home: Apache Grails
• Debug Past an HTTP 403 Without Breaking Spring Security
• The Evolution of WSL Support in JetBrains IDEsThe Evolution of WSL Support in JetBrains IDEs

That’s it for today! We’re always collecting ideas for the next Java Annotated Monthly – send us your suggestions via email or X by October 20. Don’t forget to check out our archive of past JAM issues for any articles you might have missed!