Inside Java

JDK Enhancement Proposals are OpenJDK's vehicle for documenting and communicating substantial changes of the Java language, its APIs, and the runtime but also the JDK project itself, for example when it comes to development processes. Their well-defined structure and the immense care that goes into writing them make them eminently readable and understanding them well is essential to understanding Java's development. In this "Ask the Architect" episode of the Inside Java Podcast, recorded during JavaOne 2026, Nicolai Parlog talks to Alex Buckley, the Guardian of the JEP process.

With JDK 27 introducing hybrid key exchange schemes that combine ML-KEM with traditional ECDHE algorithms, Java applications can gain TLS-layer protection against the harvest-now, decrypt-later threat without rewriting business logic. In this episode of the Inside Java Newscast, Ana explains post-quantum hybrid key exchange for TLS 1.3 and demonstrates how a Java application can take advantage of it. See https://inside.java/podcast

In 2026, Java keeps evolving: Project Valhalla is gunning for merging its value types preview in the second half of this year; Babylon wants to incubate code reflection; Loom will probably finalize the structured concurrency API; Leyden plans to ship AOT code compilation; and Amber hopes to present JEPs on constant patterns and pattern assignments. And those are just the most progressed features - more are in the pipeline and discussed in this episode of the Inside Java Newscast.

In this special episode of the Inside Java Podcast, Nicolai Parlog talks to Adam Bien about scripting with Java, to Maurice Naftalin about the history and tradeoffs of the collections framework and erasure, and to Tom Cools about the innovative way the Belgian Java User Group organizes itself.

Java's development embraces the past as well as the future and after contributing to it for over 30 years, John Rose is intimately familiar with the process. In this episode he talks about feature design, the right amount of technical debt (which isn't actually zero), why Rice's theorem demands a mix of static and dynamic checks, how Project Sumatra eventually birthed Panama and Babylon, and more. In this episode, Nicolai interviews John Rose, Senior Architect of the Java Virtual Machine, who brings over 30 years of experience advancing the Java platform.

OpenJDK projects such as Amber and Valhalla are renowned for their careful and methodical approach to designing and introducing new features to the Java platform. In this episode, Nicolai Parlog is joined by Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect at Oracle and lead of both Project Amber and Project Valhalla. Brian shares insights and updates on these influential initiatives as they discuss Amber's upcoming feature arc, Valhalla's plans for null-restriction, and more.

The Java runtime offers a host of guarantees like memory safety, type safety, encapsulation, and many more. What makes these aspirations actual guarantees is a property called "integrity". But there are a few mechanisms in Java that allow undermining integrity - some for good, some for less good reasons. Integrity by default states that all such operations need to be disabled by default. Today we discuss why that is so important, what the progress toward this goal has been, and what Java developers need to know to keep their applications going. Nicolai Parlog talks to Ron Pressler, who is Java Architect at Oracle and, among other things, lead of Project Loom.

OpenJDK's Project Leyden aims to improve the startup and warmup time of Java applications, for now by shifting computation from those phases to the applications' build time. Java 24 ships with ahead-of-time class loading and linking, which is the first step in that direction. In this episode, we learn about that as well as about Leyden's approach to reach its goals and some features that are available in its early access build plus some that aren't. Nicolai Parlog discusses with Dan Heidinga, who is JVM Runtime Architect at Oracle and, among other things, member of projects Leyden and Valhalla.