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JavaOne 2025 Highlights Developer Productivity, Language Modernization

• By John K. Waters
• March 25, 2025

Oracle hosted the JavaOne 2025 developer conference last month at its Redwood Shores campus, marking three decades since the launch of the Java programming language. The three-day event focused on advancements in APIs, concurrency, cloud-native infrastructure, and artificial intelligence tooling.

The conference opened with the release of JDK 24 and a keynote reflecting on Java’s past while setting a vision for its future. Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy made a rare public appearance, recalling how he helped retain Java creator James Gosling at Sun to launch what became a cornerstone of modern enterprise software.

Oracle’s Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java Platform Group, outlined the company's commitment to balancing innovation with stability. He introduced a slate of developer-focused improvements in JDK 24 aimed at addressing long-standing pain points, including garbage collection pauses, native library integration, and thread performance.

"Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute," Reinhold said, quoting MIT professors Abelson and Sussman to emphasize Java’s readability-first design philosophy.

Virtual threads, a highlight of JDK 21 and part of Project Loom, were showcased throughout the event. The new Helidon Níma microservices framework, rebuilt to use virtual threads, promises simpler and more scalable concurrent Java applications. Updates in JDK 24 address thread pinning issues, further boosting performance.

Chad Arimura, Oracle’s vice president of Java Developer Relations, announced Learn.java, a new educational site targeting beginners, educators and students. The site complements Oracle’s broader Java in Education initiative and aims to future-proof the developer ecosystem as Java marks its 30th anniversary.

In technical breakout sessions, Oracle engineers demonstrated how Java 21 integrates with modern Oracle Database features, including support for JSON and vector data types. They promoted converged databases as a solution to microservices complexity and highlighted tools like OSON (Oracle’s optimized storage format for JSON) and LangChain4J for embedding AI into Java applications.

Platform modernization was a central theme on Day Two. Oracle’s Per-Åke Minborg introduced the Foreign Function & Memory API (JEP 454) as a successor to JNI, providing a safer, more ergonomic way to interface with native libraries. Joe Di Pol and Romain Grecourt, both from Oracle, presented Helidon Níma, a new version of the Helidon microservices framework rewritten to support virtual threads from Project Loom. Steve Millidge of Payara advocated for platform engineering as a strategy to abstract away Kubernetes management and modernize legacy Java applications across hybrid environments.

Jakarta EE, the enterprise Java platform governed by the Eclipse Foundation, was featured in a forward-looking session led by Ivar Grimstad. Jakarta EE 11 now includes Jakarta Data 1.0, with new proposals under review for Jakarta EE 12, such as Jakarta AI and Jakarta Query.

On the final day, Oracle emphasized the importance of community engagement and AI integration. A keynote led by Oracle’s Sharat Chander and Ana-Maria Mihalceanu invited developers to contribute visions for Java’s next decade to a sealed time capsule. Attendees also participated in labs where they built AI-enhanced applications using Helidon and OpenAI models.

JavaOne 2025 underscored Oracle’s strategy to future-proof Java through investments in education, platform stability, and developer tools, while embracing emerging trends in AI and cloud computing.