Oracle is announcing the availability of Java 21, delivering thousands of performance, stability, and security improvements, including platform enhancements that will help developers increase productivity and drive innovation and growth across their organizations.
“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).
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.
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.
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.
Dev.java is the official site for Java developers, and Oracle is launching 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.
For more information about this news, visit www.oracle.com.