New release showcased at Oracle CloudWorld delivers 15 JDK Enhancement Proposals to improve the Java language and enhance the platform’s performance, stability, and security
Extensions to Long Term Support roadmap enable customers to migrate at their own pace
Oracle CloudWorld, Las Vegas—Sep 19, 2023Oracle today announced the availability of Java 21, the latest version of the world’s number one programming language and development platform. Java 21 (Oracle JDK 21) delivers thousands of performance, stability, and security improvements, including platform enhancements that will help developers increase productivity and drive innovation and growth across their organizations. Oracle is showcasing the latest capabilities in Java 21 at Oracle CloudWorld, which takes place this week (September 18-21) in Las Vegas, NV and online at oracle.com/cloudworld.
“Java continues to be the language and platform of choice for the development of robust, scalable, and secure applications used by organizations and millions of individuals around the world,” said Georges Saab, senior vice president of Oracle Java Platform and chair of the OpenJDK governing board. “The new enhancements in Java 21 enable developers to build better applications even faster than before. In addition, commercial support will be available for at least eight years to enable customers to migrate at their own pace.”
The latest Java Development Kit (JDK) provides updates and improvements with 15 JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs). JDK 21 delivers language improvements from OpenJDK project Amber (String Templates, Record Patterns, Pattern Matching for Switch, Unnamed Patterns and Variables, and Unnamed Classes and Instance Main Methods); enhancements from Project Panama (Foreign Function & Memory API and Vector API); features related to Project Loom (Virtual Threads, Scoped Values, and Structured Concurrency); performance updates (Generational ZGC); and maintenance and deprecation features (Deprecate the 32-bit x86 Port for Removal, and Prepare to Disallow the Dynamic Loading of Agents).
“Despite so many languages that are in circulation, Java is still everywhere today,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst and co-founder, RedMonk. “As the world evolves, Java’s ability to adapt will help it continue to play a key role in offering value to developers.”
Oracle will offer long term support for Java 21 for at least eight years. This extended support period gives organizations flexibility to keep applications in production longer with minimal maintenance, and to eventually migrate on their own terms. Based on customer feedback and use in the Java ecosystem, Oracle has also announced that long term support for Java 11 has been extended through at least January 2032, providing at least eight more years of support and updates from Oracle.
Significant updates delivered in Java 21 are:
The Java 21 release is the result of extensive collaboration between Oracle engineers and other members of the worldwide Java developer community via OpenJDK and the Java Community Process (JCP). In addition to the new enhancements, Java 21 is supported by Java Management Service (JMS)—an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) native service—which provides a unified console and dashboard to help organizations manage Java runtimes and applications on-premises or on any cloud. For more details on the features in Java 21, please read the Java 21 technical blog post.
Java delivers optimal performance, efficiency, and innovation when deployed in the cloud on OCI, and OCI is one of the first hyperscale clouds to support Java 21. In addition, customers gain cost savings at scale by running Java on OCI. Oracle Java SE, Oracle GraalVM, and the Java SE Subscription Enterprise Performance Pack are available free of charge on OCI, enabling developers to build and deploy applications that run faster, better, and with optimized cost-performance.
The Oracle Java Universal SE Subscription is a pay-as-you-go offering that provides customers with best-in-class support, including triage support for their entire Java portfolio, entitlement to GraalVM, the Java SE Subscription Enterprise Performance Pack, access to the advanced features of the Java Management Service, and the flexibility to upgrade at the pace of their businesses. This helps IT organizations manage complexity, contain costs, and mitigate security risks.
“Java 21 is one of the most significant releases of Java, as Virtual Threads will impact how we develop and deploy asynchronous applications, from microservices to enterprise applications,” said Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder, Agile Developer, Inc. “With little coding effort, developers’ applications can scale to support a large number of IO operations and service calls without placing an undue demand on resources. Increased scale at reduced costs is a big win for organizations that count on Java in production.”
“I’m excited about the ‘Unnamed Classes and Instance Main Methods’ preview feature in Java 21,” said Barry Burd, professor, Drew University. “In my intro courses, students can start quickly and easily without confusion or fanfare. In my books, I can present complete examples with no boilerplate code. And the best part is the way these new features sync with Java’s overarching design philosophy. Unnamed classes are joining their unnamed package and module cousins. And it’s backward-compatible too.”
“The sequenced collections feature in Java 21 is a great addition for the developer community. Developers no longer need to worry about accidentally relying on encounter order in a JUnit test, only to have it fail on the build server, upgrade, or elsewhere,” said Jeanne Boyarsky, Java Champion. “With sequenced collections, this order will be defined—which means no more surprises.”
Dev.java is the official site for Java developers, and today we are announcing the addition of a Java Playground as well as new community contributions to the content catalog.
The Java Playground is an online sandbox that allows users to type and run small Java code snippets without the need for a local runtime or IDE. Developers can now try out new features from Java 21 immediately, all from a browser, powered by OCI.
Dev.java has hundreds of high-quality Java tutorials for all skill levels, authored by the Java team at Oracle. Now, Dev.java is also accepting community contributions through a new public repository inside the Java GitHub organization.
Developers can already find community contributions today from industry luminaries such as Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, Cay Horstmann, Jeanne Boyarsky, Heinz Kabutz, Paul Anderson, and Gail Anderson.
To learn more about Java and its global ecosystem, please visit:
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Oracle CloudWorld is Oracle’s largest global celebration of customers and partners. Join us to discover the insights you need to tackle your biggest business challenges, build your skills, knowledge, and connections, and learn more about our cloud infrastructure, database, applications and developer technologies including Java from the people that build and use them. For registration, live keynotes, session details, news and more visit oracle.com/cloudworld or oracle.com/news.
Statements in this article relating to Oracle’s future plans, expectations, beliefs, and intentions are “forward-looking statements” and are subject to material risks and uncertainties. Many factors could affect Oracle’s current expectations and actual results, and could cause actual results to differ materially. A discussion of such factors and other risks that affect Oracle’s business is contained in Oracle’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, including Oracle’s most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q under the heading “Risk Factors.” These filings are available on the SEC’s website or on Oracle’s website at http://www.oracle.com/investor. All information in this article is current as of September 19, 2023 and Oracle undertakes no duty to update any statement in light of new information or future events.
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