Java Annotated Monthly – February 2026

Irina Mariasova

February is a strange little month. Short, quiet, and typically uneventful. There are fewer distractions and fewer launches, which makes it the ideal time to slow down and take a look at what is actually driving the tech world at the moment.

This issue leans into that calm, with Trisha Gee joining us as our featured content guest and sharing her thoughts and observations on the latest Java news and how it’s shaping developers’ lives. We explore where Java is heading next, what running on the latest LTS really means, and how the platform keeps improving without chasing hype. Add in some practical tutorials, Kotlin updates, AI gradually becoming capable of more and more everyday development tasks, and a few thoughtful takes along the way, and you have a February read that is relaxed in tone, but rich in ideas. 

Let’s go! 

Featured Content

Trisha Gee

Trisha Gee is a Java Champion, author, and internationally recognized speaker with over two decades of experience in software development. Known for her deep expertise in Java, high-performance systems, and developer productivity, Trisha has worked as a developer and leader in organizations ranging from startups to global enterprises. She’s passionate about sharing knowledge and helping developers write more expressive and efficient code.

Trisha is the author of multiple technical books, including Head First Java (3rd Edition) and Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA, and she frequently contributes to developer communities through blogs, webinars, and international conferences. She’s also a strong advocate for grassroots learning and regularly supports local user groups and meetups to help developers connect, grow, and thrive. When she’s not writing or coding, she’s championing inclusive practices and mentoring the next generation of developers.

Happy February, dear readers of Java Annotated Monthly! For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the words “Happy” and “February” do not usually go together. However, I do see the upside of the dark months of January and February, mostly in that things are fairly quiet, travel (for me) is usually limited, and it’s a time to take stock of how you want the rest of the year to go.

So let’s look at Java (weird, for a Java newsletter). We now know the list of features coming in Java 26. Java 25, the current version, is the latest LTS, so although you may not be ready to look at Java 26 yet, you should be running on Java 25. It’s incredible to me that Java is still evolving after all these years, and in elegant and useful ways. In Data-Oriented Programming for Java: Beyond Records, Brian Goetz talks about how data can best be represented in Java, and specifically what carrier classes are. I’m always fascinated by how the language evolves and how the engineers decide which features to add or update (like records or carrier classes). If you are too, you should watch this interview with Georges Saab. He also talks about the value of learning (I learned fairly recently that “Hello World” in Java is much simpler to write thanks to new language features). Watch Marit demonstrate them in IntelliJ IDEA. And if you are keen to expand your IntelliJ IDEA/JetBrains IDE knowledge to expert level, maybe you’ll be interested in JetBrains’ Productivity With IntelliJ IDEA full-day workshop, which is led by me!

I mentioned travel earlier in this piece – sadly I will not be going to JavaOne this year, which is super disappointing. JavaOne is where I got started with presenting at conferences, and it’s a place where I always meet interesting people, whether they are speakers, engineers working on Java itself, Java Champions, Java User Group leaders, or attendees there to learn something new. Tickets are still available, so I recommend taking a look.

That’s all from me! Remember, February is short, and it’ll be spring soon.

Java News

Fresh releases, future plans, and the inside story from the Java team. If you want to know where Java is heading and why it matters, start here:

• Java News Roundup 1, 2, 3, 4
• JavaOne Sessions and Keynotes!
• JEP 525 Brings Timeout Handling and Joiner Refinements to Java’s Structured Concurrency
• Java’s Plans for 2026 – Inside Java Newscast #104
• Carrier Classes; Beyond Records – Inside Java Newscast #105
• Java 26: what’s new?

Java Tutorials and Tips

Enjoy deep dives, advice on practical fixes, and “wait, that’s possible now?” moments: 

• Java Warmup and the Scaling Loop Problem
• Pointer Arithmetic in Modern Java
• 1B Rows with the Memory API – JEP Cafe #25
• Command completion: IntelliJ IDEA with less shortcuts
• Moving Applications From JDK 21 to JDK 25: What You Need to Know”
• Hello 2026: From a Java Dev Who Coded (and Caffeinated) Too Much in 2025 
• Virtual Thread States 
• Your Programs Are Not Single-Threaded
• Enterprise Java in Practice: Fragmentation, Platforms and Real-World Trade-offs
• How a 40-Line Fix Eliminated a 400x Performance Gap
• Functional Optics for Modern Java – Part 1
• Run Into the New Year with Java’s Ahead-of-Time Cache Optimizations
• Bootstrapping a Java File System
• Episode 44 “Java, Collections & Generics, BeJUG”
• The Java Time Bug That Still Lives in Production

Kotlin Corner

Kotlin continues to mature without losing its edge. This section covers new releases, tooling improvements, and guidance that helps teams avoid common traps.

• How to Avoid Common Pitfalls With JPA and Kotlin
• The Journey to Compose Hot Reload 1.0.0 | The Kotlin Blog
• All the New Features in Kotlin 2.3 
• Ktor 3.4.0 Is Now Available! 
• Exposed 1.0 Is Out! 
• The Journey to Compose Hot Reload 1.0.0 
• Building AI Agents in Kotlin – Part 4: Delegation and Sub-Agents 
• Update your Kotlin projects for Android Gradle Plugin 9.0 

AI 

AI is moving from experiments to everyday development work. These articles explore agents, frameworks, and patterns with a clear eye on production reality:

• Article: Agentic Terminal – How Your Terminal Comes Alive with CLI Agents
• Dev Guide: How to choose your LLM without ruining your Java code (2026 Edition)
• AI-Driven Development with Olivia McVicker
• AI Assisted Development: Real World Patterns, Pitfalls, and Production Readiness
• Bring AI into your Jakarta EE apps with LangChain4J-CDI
• Building Effective Agents with Spring AI (Part 1)
• Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 1): Agent Skills – Modular, Reusable Capabilities 
• Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 2): AskUserQuestionTool – Agents That Clarify Before Acting 
• My first two months using AI 
• Spring AI Agentic Patterns (Part 3): Why Your AI Agent Forgets Tasks (And How to Fix It) 
• Codex Is Now Integrated Into JetBrains IDEs

Languages, Frameworks, Libraries, and Technologies

From Spring and Quarkus to testing and garbage collection, this section is about trade-offs. It highlights tools and approaches that stand up to real workloads and real teams:

• This Week in Spring 1, 2, 3, 4
• From Detection to Remediation: Wiz in Your JetBrains IDE
• Quarkus: A Runtime and Framework for Cloud-Native Java
• Optimizing Java for the Cloud-Native Era with Quarkus
• Avoiding Fake Drift in Unit Tests 
• A Bootiful Podcast: Spring Security lead Rob Winchon Spring Security 7
• Flaky Tests: a journey to beat them all
• A Better Way of Creating Dev Services
• A Bootiful Podcast: Jonatan Ivanov on how to measure all the things with Micrometer
• Towards faster builds
• The Ultimate 10 Years Java Garbage Collection Guide (2016–2026) – Choosing the Right GC for Every Workload
• The Marco Show: Are Integrated Tests a Scam? TDD, Architecture, Fast Feedback – J. B. Rainsberger | The Marco Show
• Spring Boot 4 + jSpecify : Say Goodbye to NullPointerExceptions
• All You Want to Know About Spring API Versioning
• Marco Behler on a Bootiful Podcast
• I’m changing my mind about serverless 

Conferences and Events

Check out the events that offer chances to meet the community, hear new ideas, and recharge your enthusiasm for building software: 

• Jfokus – Stockholm, Sweden, February 2–4
• Voxxed Days Ticino – Lugano, Switzerland, February 6; Marit van Dijk and Anton Arhipov will present their topics. Join the session to listen and meet them in person.
• Voxxed Days CERN – Meyrin, Switzerland, February 10; Marit van Dijk will talk about how to increase your productivity in IntelliJ IDEA.
• ConFoo Montreal – Montreal, Canada, February 25–27
• IntelliJ IDEA Conf – Online, March 26-27 – Registration is open!

Culture and Community

Technical skill grows faster when paired with reflection. Here you will find stories about leadership, learning, and the people behind the code: 

• Dimitry Jemerov on IntelliJ @ 25, Kotlin, and so much more
• Why is my Talk selected? Reflections from a Program Committee Reviewer
• Taking the Technical Leadership Path
• Culture Through Tension: Leading Interdisciplinary Teams with Nick Gillian
• The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice
• 8 Logical Fallacies That Mess Us All Up 
• Marit van Dijk and Anton Arhipov: 25 Years of IntelliJ IDEA

And Finally…

Here are the most interesting articles for the past month from the IntelliJ IDEA blog: 

• IntelliJ IDEA Conf 2026: Learn From the People Building the JVM Ecosystem
• Spring Boot Debugging – Now Remote
• Spring Data JDBC Made Easy with IntelliJ IDEA
• How to Avoid Common Pitfalls With JPA and Kotlin

That’s it for today! We’re always collecting ideas for the next Java Annotated Monthly – send us your suggestions via email or X by February 20. Don’t forget to check out our archive of past JAM issues for any articles you might have missed!

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