Java is a 30-year success story, made possible because its development consistently aligned with users’ needs. In its early days, the platform required new features quickly, but over time, minimizing code breakage while carefully evolving the platform became essential. Critical junctures along that path included the introduction of modules and the current strive toward integrity by default.

Nicolai Parlog talks to Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform, who brings nearly three decades of experience shaping Java’s evolution.

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.

Java is not just adding features, it’s also removing old ones that became obsolete and are either a maintenance burden, performance drag, or hazardous to use. In this episode we touch on 32bit ports, applets, finalization, and the security manager.

Nicolai Parlog talks to Stuart Marks, who works in the JDK Core Libraries group at Oracle. Right now, he’s dressed in a lab coat and wears a stethoscope because he embodies his alter ego Dr. Deprecator.

Nicolai Parlog talks to Stuart Marks, who works in the JDK Core Libraries group at Oracle. Right now, he’s dressed in a lab coat and wears a stethoscope because he embodies his alter ego Dr. Deprecator.

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.

The Stable Values API is a preview feature in Java 25 that allows developers to define immutable objects that are initialized at most once. It combines the flexibility of lazy initialization with the performance advantages of final fields.

In this episode, Ana hosts Per Minborg, a member of the Java Core Library team at Oracle and co-author of JEP 502 on Stable Values. Per explains the concept behind Stable Values and how this approach addresses the drawbacks of eager initialization in Java. By deferring the creation of expensive resources until they are actually needed, Stable Values contribute to more efficient application startup. He also discusses the design process and specifics of the API, highlighting its benefits in multi-threaded environments—particularly its ability to ensure thread-safe, at-most-once initialization without the need for complex synchronization mechanisms.

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.

In this episode, Ana is joined by Viktor Klang, core JDK architect and author of the Stream Gatherers JDK Enhancement Proposal, to dive into one of the standout features of JDK 24: the Gatherers API.

Viktor explains how Gatherers extend the Java Stream API with custom intermediate operations, why they were added to the platform, and how they can enhance your day-to-day Java development. He also shares practical tips for using the Gatherers API effectively, along with insights into the design process and how community feedback plays a crucial role in shaping future JDK features.

Java leads by example regarding documentation: JavaDoc inspires trust in developers through its transparency on each Java API functionality, and the javadoc tool helps developers generate equally great documentation for their APIs and libraries.

In this episode, Ana hosts Jonathan Gibbons, core contributor and maintainer of JDK tools, to discuss JavaDoc/javadoc developments, focusing on markdown in JavaDoc documentation comments. Given the importance of having code that is as easy to understand as it is functional, Jonathan dives into significant changes in Java’s documentation component and associated tools, how JavaDoc is maintained, code documentation practices, and more.