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Java Annotated Monthly – November 2026

October kept the Java world busy, with JDK news, fresh tutorials, Kotlin updates, AI experiments, and plenty more from across the wider ecosystem. We’ve gathered the best of it in one place, so you can skip the scrolling and get straight to the good stuff. To top it all off, Piotr Przybył joins us as this month’s featured guest.

Let’s go!

Featured Content

Piotr Przybył

Piotr Przybył – Notorious engineer at work and after hours, tracing the meanders of the art of software engineering. Remote Software Gardener, mostly working in web-oriented Java gardens. Java Champion. Docker Captain. Testcontainers Champion. Programming usually in Java (since 1.3), Scala, and Go, but in other languages too. Fan of agility, seen mostly as choosing the right tools and approaches after asking the right questions. Developer, trainer, and conference speaker, currently working at Elastic as a Senior Developer Advocate.


Greetings, fellow Java developers! It’s a pleasure to be here again – it’s been three Java releases since the last time. We all know that means roughly 18 months, don’t we? ;-)
Both the world and our ecosystem were moving fast back then, and it seems they have only accelerated. This means one thing: good luck trying to keep up to date with everything. Luckily for us all, newsletters like this one help.

The autumn conference season of 2026 is slowing down. It was a busy and exciting one, for me in particular, because Java 28 is already shaping up. And if you look at the list of JEPs already there, how can you not be excited? Structured Concurrency is set to become final in March 2027, yay! Bye-bye, CompletableFuture, it was fun knowing you… not ;-). CF isn’t going anywhere, but it won’t be the best abstraction for concurrent subtasks.
Apart from that, there’s going to be one less thing for me to rant about, because Java is going to have (for now as an incubator module) a Simple JSON API. If your microservice only has to send one simple REST request with a JSON body, maybe this plus the JDK’s HTTP client will be enough? You can learn about it from Dan Vega.
There are going to be improvements to GCs and more performance goodies, but my personal favourite is going to be Value Objects, because 42 is always 42, and it shouldn’t need an identity crisis to answer everything. I believe VOs will change the way we think about and work with data in Java. The need for this improvement is already here, because AI, like it or not, also means exchanging an awful lot of tokens and vectors.

To give you a taste of that, the following code yields different results on a default HotSpot configuration, with and without the value-object preview enabled:

Integer x = 1024, y = 1024; IO.println(x == y)

Intrigued? For more, please check out my post Java isn’t dead yet, but it can’t avoid Valhalla.

You may say, “Okay, but these are preview features or incubator modules; they can’t be used in production.” That’s not a blanket rule, although compatibility and support deserve a closer look. Sometimes even a non-GA feature of Java can be mature and worthwhile enough for you to make it a part of your library and code. I’m talking about the Vector API already being used in Lucene and Elasticsearch, and you can learn more about how it powers semantic search in them in one of my recent talks. If you prefer reading about SIMD, Krzysztof Ślusarski has you covered with this post.

I could go on and on about the exciting stuff in recent and upcoming Java releases. Marit van Dijk and I weren’t quite able to curb our enthusiasm for them, as can be seen in this three-hour-long deep dive from Devoxx Belgium 😅. (We simply forgot to take a break, sorry!)
If you can spare just one hour, here’s a shorter and more compact version from Hello Stavanger.

A big congrats to Marit, my partner on stage, for becoming the most ubiquitous Java speaker for 2026!

Java News

Catch up on the latest updates:

Some JEPs to pay attention to:

Java Tutorials and Tips

Practical guides, clever shortcuts, and fresh ideas to help you understand Java better:

Kotlin Corner

Explore what’s new in Kotlin, sharpen your skills, and put your knowledge into practice:

AI

Discover smarter AI workflows and see how they reshape development – this month with a healthy dose of reality checks:

Languages, Frameworks, Libraries, and Technologies

Look beyond Java, Kotlin, and AI. There’s more happening across development:

Conferences and Events

Plan your education sessions and networking, both online and offline:

Culture and Community\

Find articles on developer life, career growth, and how engineers keep learning to survive with AI:

And Finally…

Check out what’s new from the IntelliJ IDEA blog in October:

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 November 20. Remember to check out our archive of past JAM issues for any articles you might have missed!

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