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.

Java's use of memory, often chided for being excessive, is actually a strength as it trades more memory use for fewer CPU cycles. Java can only make this tradeoff due to its moving garbage collectors, something more memory efficient platforms often cannot. But what's the point in leaving available memory on the table if using it makes your program run faster? Efficient use of that resource wouldn't be to leave it untapped but to use it to speed up the program.

In this "Ask the Architect" episode of the Inside Java Podcast, recorded during JavaOne 2026, Nicolai Parlog talks to Ron Pressler, Java Architect at Oracle.

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

Flexible constructor bodies were added to Java 25 with JEP 513. In this episode of the Inside Java Newscast Billy Korando will review the issues with how constructors used to work before Java 25, either forcing developers to write convoluted code, or in some cases undermining the safety and integrity of child classes. Billy will then cover how flexible constructor bodies address these issues and how Java developers can use them to write safer code and better designed applications.

Make sure to check https://inside.java/podcast

In JavaOne 2026's closing session, audience members had the opportunity to ask the Java architects questions. They asked about the state of structured concurrency and Project Babylon, how Java is being developed and the role AI plays in that process, the architects' pet projects, and whether they would ever consider breaking backward compatibility, etc.

Make sure to check https://inside.java/podcast

With JDK 26 / JEP 500 starting to prevent final field mutation through reflection, it is important that Java projects stop employing that practice.

For more, check https://inside.java/podcast

G1 is Java's default garbage collector in most environments, and its throughput has been considerably improved in JDK 26 by streamlining its write barriers. This conversation explores the background of that change and dives deep into regions, write barriers, concurrent marking, card tables, and how all that impacts throughput before eventually getting to the improvements made in Java 26, which lay further groundwork to G1 becoming the one and only default collector across _all_ environments.

In this "Ask the Architect" episode of the Inside Java Podcast, recorded during JavaOne 2026, Nicolai Parlog talks to Stefan Johansson, Hotspot Garbage Collection engineer at Oracle.

For more, check https://inside.java/podcast

The Java tool jcmd ("j command") sends diagnostic commands to the JVM, which will react by supplying the desired information: from finalizer queues to heap and thread dumps, from GC insights to virtual thread scheduler statistics. At the moment, this requires a running JVM, but once candidate JEP 528 is adopted, a lot of that information can be seamlessly extracted from a crashed JVM's core dump, allowing easy post-mortem analysis.