Best of Java — January 2026

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   Article

   Krzysztof·14w

   What is your most used design pattern

   A developer shares their experience with design patterns, noting that while many patterns exist, few are commonly implemented in practice. The Singleton pattern stands out as their most frequently used pattern, first encountered while working with Unity Engine for managing shared state across scenes, and later applied across various technologies including Java and TypeScript. The post invites others to share their most commonly used design patterns.

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   Article

   Spring·12w

   Spring Boot 3.5.10 available now

   Spring Boot version 3.5.10 has been released and is now available for download and use.

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   Article

   Red Hat Developer·14w

   The case for building enterprise agentic apps with Java instead of Python

   Java offers significant advantages over Python for enterprise AI applications in regulated industries. The JVM provides architectural stability through compile-time verification, mature security tooling with SAST and CVE management, and unified observability. Java frameworks like Spring AI and Quarkus with LangChain4j enable production-grade agentic applications while maintaining existing governance standards, reducing cognitive load on teams, and leveraging established Java expertise. Code-specialized LLMs also generate higher quality Java code due to strong typing and abundant well-structured training data.

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   Article

   Shaaf·15w

   Keycloak MCP Server: Manage Identity with Natural Language

   An MCP server enables natural language management of Keycloak identity and access management through AI assistants. The open-source project supports 45+ operations including user management, realm configuration, client setup, and authentication flows. Version 0.3 introduces JWT authentication, SSE transport, Kubernetes deployment support, containerization, and production-ready features like health checks and Prometheus metrics. Developers can manage Keycloak by conversing with AI assistants instead of using the admin console or CLI commands.

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   Article

   Spring·15w

   Spring gRPC 1.0.1 Available Now

   Spring gRPC version 1.0.1 has been released. This is a maintenance update for the Spring framework's gRPC integration, which enables Java developers to build gRPC-based services using Spring Boot conventions.

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   Article

   InfoWorld·13w

   PHP language still relevant, advocate insists

   PHP remains highly relevant in 2026 despite declining spotlight, powering major platforms like WordPress and Drupal. A Perforce Zend specialist argues PHP is still the most popular server-side language by wide margin, with PHP 8.x improvements addressing performance concerns through JIT compilation and enhanced concurrency handling. While Python excels at ML and real-time analytics, and Java suits massive enterprise systems, PHP offers faster development cycles and adapts well to cloud-native and containerized deployments. Current language popularity indexes rank PHP between 7th and 15th place.

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   Article

   Spring·11w

   A Bootiful Podcast: Start Your Year with Java Right with Java Developer Advocate Billy Korando

   A podcast episode featuring Java Developer Advocate Billy Korando discussing Java development and the Spring ecosystem. The conversation covers Java best practices and Spring framework capabilities for building various types of applications.

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   Article

   Spring·15w

   This Week in Spring - January 6th, 2026

   A weekly roundup of Spring Framework news, updates, and resources for the Java development community. This edition covers developments from the first week of January 2026.

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   Article

   Quarkus·15w

   New Dev Services Api

   Quarkus 3.25 introduces a new Dev Services API that resolves port conflicts and excessive resource usage in test suites by deferring service startup until after augmentation. The new model eliminates the problem where all Dev Services started during JUnit discovery, causing multiple containers to run simultaneously. Extension authors benefit from a simpler programming model using builders, with Quarkus core handling discovery and container reuse. Migration requires implementing the Startable interface, using builder patterns instead of direct construction, and removing static variables from extension processors. Several extensions including Redis, Lambda, Narayana, and Kafka have already been converted, with ongoing work tracked for others.

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    Article

    JetBrains·12w

    IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3.2 Is Out!

    IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3.2 has been released with bug fixes addressing terminal flickering when using CLI tools like Claude Code, multiple credential storage and settings synchronization issues in remote development, and improvements to run configuration handling in the Services tool window. The update is available through the IDE, Toolbox App, snaps for Ubuntu, or direct download.

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    Article

    Baeldung·12w

    Java Weekly, Issue 630

    Weekly curated collection of Java ecosystem updates featuring Spring AI agentic patterns, Jakarta Persistence 4.0 milestone, OpenJDK security patches, and a comprehensive garbage collection guide. Includes release announcements for Spring Framework 7.0.3, Spring Security 7.1.0-M1, Quarkus, WildFly 39, Gradle 9.3.0, and other ecosystem tools. Also covers functional optics in Java, GPU optimization with Babylon and HAT, and JPA-Kotlin integration pitfalls.

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    Article

    Baeldung·12w

    Guide to MapStruct @IterableMapping

    MapStruct's @IterableMapping annotation provides granular control over collection mappings in Java. It enables custom formatting through attributes like dateFormat for converting string dates to LocalDate objects, allows selecting specific mapping methods using qualifiedByName to exclude sensitive fields like passwords, and handles null collections safely with nullValueMappingStrategy to return empty collections instead of null. This eliminates manual boilerplate code for iterating and transforming collection elements.

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    Article

    Collections·13w

    This Week in Spring - January 20th, 2026

    Spring Framework ecosystem updates for mid-January 2026 include new Spring Boot releases with cloud-native enhancements and performance optimizations. Spring Cloud continues gaining traction for distributed systems development. The community remains active with contributions, tutorials, and discussions. Framework integrations with other Java technologies are advancing to simplify enterprise application development.

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    Article

    Scott Logic·13w

    Functional Optics for Modern Java

    Lenses, prisms, and traversals are composable abstractions that solve Java's immutability gap by treating access paths as first-class values. Lenses focus on exactly one value in product types, prisms handle optional variants in sum types, and traversals operate on zero or more values in collections. Using Higher-Kinded-J's annotation-driven generation, these optics compose to create powerful paths for reading and updating deeply nested immutable structures without manual reconstruction. The article demonstrates practical patterns including lens composition, type-safe downcasting with prisms, filtered traversals, and previews effect-polymorphic operations and the Focus DSL.

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