Foojay Podcast #92: Java 26 Is Here: What's New, What's Gone, and Why It Matters in 2026

Java 26 lands on March 17 with ten JEPs, a mix of cleanups, performance work, and new language features. Teams running on older LTS releases face a familiar question. What changes matter today, and what can wait? In this conversation with Simon Ritter and Loïc Mathieu, we go through every JEP in Foojay Podcast #92 and talk about what each one means in practice.

What we talked about

Differences between Long Term Support and Short Term Support releases
Java version adoption patterns across companies
UUIDv7 support and internal improvements
JEP 500: Prepare to Make Final Mean Final
JEP 526: Lazy Constants
JEP 517: HTTP/3 for the HTTP Client API
JEP 504: Remove the Applet API
JEP 524: PEM Encodings
JEP 516: Ahead-of-Time Object Caching
JEP 522: G1 GC Throughput Improvements
JEP 525: Structured Concurrency
JEP 529: Vector API
JEP 530: Primitive Types in Patterns
AI workloads and what they ask of the Java platform

Why it matters

Java 26 is a Short Term Support release, but several of its JEPs point at where the platform is heading. HTTP/3, structured concurrency, and primitive types in patterns each touch code that real teams write every day. Knowing what is preview and what is final helps you plan upgrades without surprises.

See the Foojay Podcast #92 for all info, shownotes, links, etc.