Java Annotated Monthly – August 2026 

Irina Mariasova

July gave the tech world plenty to talk about, from fresh releases and useful tutorials to Kotlin updates, AI experiments, and new ideas across the wider ecosystem. We packed the best of it into one issue, so you can skip scrolling and get straight to the good stuff. To top it all off, Donald Raab joins us as this month’s featured author.

Let’s go! 

Featured Content 

Donald Raab

Donald Raab is a Java Champion and creator of the open source Java library Eclipse Collections. He is an international Java and open source conference speaker. Don is the author of the book Eclipse Collections Categorically: Level Up Your Programming Game and was a contributing author to 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know from O’Reilly Media. He was a member of the JSR (Java Specification Request) 335 Expert Group, and has served on the JCP (Java Community Process) Executive Committee for two financial services firms. Donald was the winner of the JCP Member/Participant of the Year Award for 2025. He blogs regularly on his website.

If there is one blog post you read this month, then I hope it will be The Official Java Documentary by Stuart Marks.

The importance of telling our Java stories

We all have stories to tell, but they sometimes only get told when we tell them. Jim Grisanzio shared an archive of 77 Duke’s Corner Podcasts, which is a literal treasure trove of Java stories. I am ecstatic to see Java Champions like Rustam Mehmandarov blogging again. Write more please!

In Level Up Your Programming Game With a Java Book and Smalltalk, I tell the story of creating an open source Java library and writing a Java book inspired by my experience as a former Smalltalk developer.

Memory efficiency is back, and it’s coming for your allocations

In Why You Should Tune Code Before Your Garbage Collector, Peter Lawrey explains why optimizing memory allocation might make a bigger difference than your choice of garbage collector. As I like to say, the easiest garbage to collect is the garbage you didn’t create.

I’ve written a lot in the past four months about memory efficiency in Java. In Save Memory in Java by Making Memory Efficiency Your Top Priority, you will find many of the blog posts I have written recently about this topic. I’ve been teaching Java developers how to write code like it’s 2004 again, but with all the cool new Java language features.

Java News

Catch up on the latest updates:

• Java News Roundup 1, 2, 3, 4 

Java Tutorials and Tips

Practical guides, clever shortcuts, and fresh ideas to help you understand Java better: 

• The Java Story: A Film About All of Us
• The Java Story | The Official Documentary
• ZGC: A Decade of Redefining Java Performance
• Nulling Out References Won’t Help Your Garbage Collector 
• Why We Moved Our Timefold Java Worker Pods from AMD to ARM64
• Jeffrey Microscope for Generating Flame Graphs in Java
• A Bootiful Podcast: Java Developer Advocate Billy Korando on Java 27 and Beyond
• Resumable file uploads with plain Jakarta EE and TUS protocol
• Valhalla, Now! 
• To Cache or Not to Cache Virtual Threads 
• Pairing In-Process and Hosted Embeddings for Java MCP Tool Development 
• New Between-Quarters Security Updates for Java: What CSPUs Mean for Your Release Pipeline

Kotlin Corner

Explore what’s new in Kotlin, sharpen your skills, and put your knowledge into practice.

• Kotlin Comes to BlueJ
• In Conversation With the Golden Kodee Winners
• Demystifying Exposed: The Intelligent SQL Library for Kotlin
• Introducing the Kotlin Benchmark for AI Coding Agents
• The History of Kodee, Kotlin’s Mascot
• Kotlin Turns 15: Celebrate the Kotlin Effect
• KotlinLLM is Going Open Source 
• Dissecting Kotlin: 2026 | Huyen Tue Dao 
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Value Semantics (in Kotlin) | Marat Akhin 
• Run, Kotlin, Run! | Marc Reichelt
• The State of Amper | Joffrey Bion
• Local Lifetimes for Kotlin | Ross Tate
• Eval-Driven Development: The Fine Line Between Agentic Success and Failure | Urs Peter
• Building Enterprise Ready AI with Koog | Vadim Briliantov 

AI 

Explore smarter AI workflows and see how they reshape development:

• 95% of AI Projects Fail. Here’s Why. – Josh Long | The Marco Show
• Can You Use Java for AI? Why Java Is Better Positioned Than You Think
• Software Design in the Agentic Age: Place Your Bets
• 2026 State of the Art: Are Developers Being Replaced by AI?
• Of Skills and Loops with AI Assistance
• Agentic AI Architecture
• The Multi-Agent Approach: Building Reliable and Controllable Software Development Automation
• Making Sense of Google Agentic Dev Tools
• A Bootiful Podcast: Russ Miles on Safer, More Productive Interactions with AI
• AI Solutions with Spring AI 2.0
• Are non-functional requirements the missing guardrail for AI-generated code?
• Better Models: Worse Tools 

Languages, Frameworks, Libraries, and Technologies

Look beyond Java, Kotlin, and AI. There’s plenty more happening across development: 

• This Week in Spring 1, 2, 3, 4
• Spring AI 2 + Ollama: Local LLM, No API Keys
• Spring Office Hours Podcast: S5E19 – Docker, Compose, Testcontainers, Oh My!
• A Bootiful Podcast: Sébastien Deleuze on the latest-and-greatest in Spring AI and Spring Framework
• The Kubernetes Approach to AI-Assisted Maintainership Prioritises Human Accountability
• Spring Office Hours Podcast: S5E18 – The Latest from OpenAI, Anthropic and Spring AI 2.0
• The Joyful Journey from Spring Boot to Quarkus
• Six and a half ridiculous things to do with Quarkus
• Toward a Durable Spring PetClinic
• The Self-Building Agent: A LangChain4j Experiment

Conferences and Events

While taking a break from offline conferences, get ready for IntelliJ IDEA’s event this September.

Culture and Community

Learn more about what is shaping the developer community:

• The Future of Engineering: Mindsets That Matter When Code Isn’t Enough
• First, ten
• Foojay Podcast #100: Java Podcasters on Why They Started, What Broke, and What They Learned
• A return to two-pizza culture 

And Finally…

Check out what’s new in IntelliJ IDEA this July: 

• IntelliJ IDEA Goes LSP: Java and Kotlin Intelligence Comes to VS Code, Cursor, and Agentic Flows

• What’s New in IntelliJ IDEA 2026.2
• What’s fixed in IntelliJ IDEA 2026.2
• IntelliJ Scala Plugin 2026.2 Is Out!
• Reverse Engineering with Hibernate 7.4 and IntelliJ IDEA

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 August 20. Don’t forget to check out our archive of past JAM issues for any articles you might have missed!