Foojay.io, the Friends Of OpenJDK!

Every six months, we get a new version of Java. Java 26 is just around the corner and will be released soon. But most companies stick to LTS (Long-Term Support) versions, which are maintained and receive security updates for many more years. Versions 8, 11, 17, 21, and 25 are such LTS versions. Hopefully, most of your systems are already on the latest versions and you are not stuck on 8 or earlier. As a reminder, 8 was released in 2014, so much has changed since then.If you are doubting moving from 21 to 25, or even from an earlier version to the latest LTS, this podcast is for you! Together with Jakob Jenkov, we discussed the most important changes, and this episode includes a few quotes from interviews recorded at conferences last year.
Guests
Jakob Jenkov
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakob-jenkov-4a3a8/
Jonathan Vila
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanvila/
Ryan Svihla
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-svihla-096752182/
Mary Grygleski
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-grygleski/
Anton Arhipov
https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonarhipov/
Ronald Dehuysser
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronalddehuysser/
Jonathan Ellis
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbellis/
Content
00:00 Introduction of topic and guest
Tutorials by Jakob
Podcast #89: Quarkus and Agentic Commerce
03:30 Bugfixes and performance improvements "under the hoods"
Quote Jonathan Vila
08:00 Java as a scripting language
Quote Ryan Svihla
Compact Source Files and Instance Main methods
Launch Multi-File Source-Code Programs
https://www.jbang.dev/
Quote Mary Grygleski
15:03 GC Improvements
Generational Shenandoah
Trash Talk - Exploring the JVM memory management by Gerrit Grunwald
What Should I Know About Garbage Collection as a Java Developer?
19:44 Project Loom: Virtual Threads and Structured Concurrency
Quote Anton Arhipov
29:44 How Java evolves
6-months release cycle
How incubator and preview features are used to get feedback from the community
Long-Term Support Short-Term Support versions
Foojay Podcast #28: Java 21 Has Arrived!
Foojay Podcast #45: Welcome to Java 22
Foojay Podcast #57: Welcome to OpenJDK (Java) 23
Foojay Podcast #68: Welcome to OpenJDK (Java) 24
Foojay Podcast #78: Welcome to OpenJDK 25!
32:15 Project Leyden: Ahead-of-time features
Ahead-of-Time Command-Line Ergonomics
Ahead-of-Time Method Profiling
Ahead-of-Time Class Loading & Linking
39:15 Project Babylon
Java on CPU, GPU, FPGA?
This is already possible with TornadoVM
Foojay Podcast #82: OpenJDK Projects (Leyden, Babylon, Panama) and TornadoVM
43:25 Class-File API
Quote Ronald Dehuysser
JavaFX In Action #22 with Matt Coley, diving into byte code and JARs with Recaf and JavaFX libraries
49:20 Foreign Function and Memory API
The FFM API: How OpenJDK Changed the Game for Native Interactions (And Made Pi4J Better!)
jChampions Conference talk 'Foreign Function & Memory (FFM) API on Raspberry Pi'
54:26 Vector API
Quote Jonathan Ellis + Ryan Svihla
59:59 Removal of String templates
01:00:26 Taking a look into the JVM of the future
01:03:08 Conclusion

For this episode of the Foojay Podcast, we invited the author of three recent posts published on Foojay. And he brought a colleague to get even more expert knowledge in this podcast! We talk about Quarkus, how it is "cloud-native", how it compares to other frameworks, the advantages for developers and managers, etc. We also discussed nano businesses and how they can serve as a model for paying creators of digital content, thanks to x402 and ERC-8004.

Michal Maléř
https://foojay.io/today/author/michal-maler/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michal-maléř-69344692/
https://www.mickeymaler.com/
Holly Cummins
https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly-k-cummins/
https://hollycummins.com/
https://noti.st/holly-cummins

Links
Quarkus: A Runtime and Framework for Cloud-Native Java
Optimizing Java for the Cloud-Native Era with Quarkus
Not a Lucid Web3 Dream Anymore: x402, ERC-8004, A2A, and The Next Wave of AI Commerce
J-Spring 2023: Five Tricks for Java - Holly Cummins: The code we write has a climate impact. But how big is that impact? How do we measure it? How do we reduce it? Is the cloud helping?
JavaFX In Action #10 with Clément de Tastes about QuarkusFX, combining the strengths of Quarkus and JavaFX
Comparing a REST H2 Spring versus Quarkus application on Raspberry Pi
Open Source Collective
Commonhaus Foundation
A fun trick for getting discovered by LLMs and AI tools

Content

00:00 Introduction of topic and guests
01:04 Why contribute to Foojay as an author
01:33 What is Quarkus?
02:56 Quarkus compared with other frameworks
05:08 Quarkus a replacement for JVM?
06:40 Build time optimization versus Ahead Of Time (AOT) versus Just In Time (JIT)
12:53 Other important facts about Quarkus
18:13 Impact on Cloud financial and ecological cost
21:31 Vert.x reactive toolkit compared to Virtual Threads
24:14 New features in Quarkus
26:02 Is Quarkus more modern compared to other frameworks?
27:13 What are chain transactions
31:10 How can a (web) author earn from his content?
35:54 How this can impact open-source development
38:34 Will these open standards get adopted?
39:47 How opensource can be funded (Commonhaus)
43:00 How content creators could be funded and publish their content in the future
46:01 MCP as content distribution (with Quarkus)?
46:49 Conclusion

What turns a nervous first-timer into a confident conference speaker? Let's find out.
This the last Foojay Podcast of 2025 and also the last one with interviews recorded at the Devoxx and JFall conferences. Maybe you're already thinking about your goals for 2026: organizing a meetup, submitting your first conference talk, or taking a bigger role in the Java community. If that sounds like you, this episode is for you.
I talked with the people behind these conferences and developers at different stages of their speaking journey. At Devoxx, I spoke with Stephan Janssen, who has been organizing Devoxx for 20 years, Susanne Pieterse, about what makes conferences valuable for learning, and Daniël Floor, a developer just starting out with public speaking. At JFall, I caught up with organizers Martin Smelt and Brian Vermeer, Berwout de Vries Robles, who coaches new speakers, and Annelore Egger about her journey from developer to conference speaker.
You'll hear practical advice about what makes a good CFP, why conference organizers actively want new speakers, and how the Java community is set up to help you get started. Whether you're thinking about submitting your first talk or curious about what goes into organizing a conference, there's something here for you.

00:00 Introduction of topic and guests
01:33 Stephan Janssen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanjanssen/
Devoxx Organizer
07:03 Martin Smelt
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-paul-smelt-8b699a8/
JFall Organizer
13:27 Brian Vermeer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianvermeer/
JFall Organizer and speaker
Tips for speakers, writing a CFP
Join a JUG!
21:02 Annelore Egger
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anneloredev/
How to become a speaker
27:43 Daniël Floor
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dani%C3%ABl-floor-266652208/
Taking the first steps into public speaking
Finding your speaking topic
31:28 Berwout de Vries Robles
https://www.linkedin.com/in/berwout-de-vries-robles/
Tips for speakers
Propose a talk to speak at a JUG
37:08 Susanne Pieterse
https://www.linkedin.com/in/susannepieterse/
Learning at conferences, RAG, and other topics
Meeting and talking to the presenters and specialists at a conference
CO-organizer of ML Con and DevOpsCon in Amsterdam
https://mlconference.ai/
https://devopscon.io/amsterdam/
41:20 Conclusion

What if work-life balance is a myth, and the real secret is just... life?
In this Foojay Podcast we're stepping away from pure code and diving into something equally important: how we live our lives as developers. Because let's be honest, being a great programmer isn't just about mastering Java or the latest framework. It's about managing your career, your health, your family, and finding purpose in all of it.
Four incredible guests are all tackling different pieces of this puzzle. First up, Bruno Souza, the Brazilian Java Man, is back to challenge our thinking about work-life balance and share his philosophy on taking control of your career. Then Patricia Lenten talks about the real challenges of hacking parenting while being an engineer, and how we can inspire the next generation of developers. Georgios Diamantopoulos brings the hard data on why sitting is literally killing us and what we can actually do about it. And finally, April Schuppel shares lessons from Apryse's journey through 15 acquisitions in five years—and why people, not AI, are still the most important part of building great products.
00:00 Introduction of topic and guests
01:20 Bruno Souza
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brjavaman/
Grow your career podcast: https://foojay.io/today/foojay-podcast-72/
Bruno's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@brjavaman
Work-life balance doesn't exist, we only have life
12:52 Patricia Lenten
https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricialenten/
Hacking your parenting
Technology is fun
18:37 Georgios Diamantopoulos
https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgiosd/
Staying Healthy
The importance of getting out of your chair
https://stateofhealth.tech/
22:58 April Schuppel
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprilschuppel/
Pull, Push, and Merge: Lessons from a Journey of Growth Through Acquisitions
The people are the most crucial part to build a team, product, and company
30:26 Outro

The AI revolution isn't replacing Java developers. No, it's forcing us to think harder.
Welcome to another episode of the Foojay Podcast! Today, we're talking about AI and Java, how it's changing the way we work, what we need to watch out for, and why understanding what's really happening matters more than ever.
I recorded interviews at Devoxx and JFall and spoke with people who build and use this technology every day.
Marianne Hoornenborg opened my eyes to something important: every time an AI generates a token, there's a massive amount of computation happening behind the scenes.
Viktor Gamov and Baruch Sadogursky did something really cool: they tested six different AI coding tools live on stage with the same task. The results were all over the place! But they found that the tools with access to good documentation performed much better.
Stephen Chin showed me how graph databases can make AI responses more reliable by providing a solid source of truth rather than relying on vector search.
Mario Fusco works on LangChain4J, a leading Java framework for AI. He explained that breaking down large tasks into smaller ones and using specialized agents can help reduce errors—hallucinations, as they're called.
Jeroen Benckhuijsen and Martijn Dashorst shared their experiences working with enterprise Java. Even as frameworks are becoming lighter and we're running everything in containers, there are still complex problems that require real developer expertise.
Maarten Mulders reminds us that AI is a tool, not a replacement—especially when you're solving problems no one has tackled before. You still need to know what you're doing.
And finally, Simon Maple from Tessel discussed moving beyond vibe coding towards a more reliable, production-ready approach, using specifications to guide AI tools.
00:00 Introduction of topics and guests
02:12 Marianne Hoornenborg
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mhoornenborg/
The Simple Math behind AI
The cost of tokens when using LLMs
06:54 Viktor Gamov and Baruch Sadogursky
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikgamov/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbaruch/
Robocoders, about the many agentic tools that can be used for vibe coding
https://context7.com/
16:24 Stephen Chin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveonjava/
Graph versus relational databases
Explaining MCP and Agents
23:09 Mario Fusco
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mario-fusco-3467213/
AI and LangChain4j in Quarkus
Coding tools with AI
35:43 Jeroen Benckhuijsen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeroenbenckhuijsen/
Java in business, Evolutions in Java
Making use of containers and Kubernetes
Learning from the community
41:44 Martijn Dashorst
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dashorst/
Investigating an OOM-killer in Kubernetes with the help of AI
49:37 Maarten Mulders
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mthmulders/
How AI may impact our jobs
How to improve your Maven builds
56:13 Simon Maple
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonmaple/
AI developer tool Tessl
Spec-driven vibe coding
Secure AI development
01:02:12 Conclusion