Java at 30: Oracle leaders on why Java 25 matters for the next decade

In the fast-changing world of technology, very few programming languages can claim a three-decade run at the centre of enterprise IT. Java, born in the mid-1990s, turned 30 this year, still powering critical workloads across banking, telecom, retail, and government systems. Against a backdrop where newer languages rise and fade in less than a decade, Java continues to reinvent itself. With the release of Java 25, Oracle is signalling not just another upgrade, but a thoughtful re-architecting of how the platform will remain relevant in an AI-driven, cloud-native world.

In an exclusive interaction with Dataquest, Oracle executives - Bernard Traversat, Vice President of Software Development; Chad Arimura, Vice President of Developer Relations; Sharat Chander, Senior Director, Java Product Management, Oracle- shared why Java has endured, how Java 25 strikes a balance between simplicity and enterprise power, and what the roadmap looks like for the next decade.

The Secret Sauce: 30 Years of stewardship and thoughtful evolution

Asked about Java’s resilience, Chad Arimura pointed first to stewardship. “At the top of the list is the incredible commitment by Sun and now Oracle to continue to shepherd the ecosystem forward. OpenJDK, which Oracle stewards and contributes to, has been central to this continuity.”

 Sharat Chander reframed Java’s journey as “a rise and thoughtful rise,” rather than a cycle of rise and fall. “Year after year, the ecosystem has grown to tens of millions of developers and tens of thousands of customers. That is because investments have consistently gone into innovating for modern workloads, ensuring enterprise value, and sustaining robust relationships with developers.”

Another turning point was the six-month release cadence, introduced eight years ago. “It keeps innovation flowing steadily. After 30 years, the pipeline is stronger than ever,” he noted.

Lowering the entry barrier without losing power

One of Java 25’s biggest themes is accessibility. Features such as Compact Source Files (JDK Enhancement Proposal, JEP 512) and Module Import Declarations (JEP 511) simplify how beginners start coding. (JEPs are the formal blueprints that describe new features in the Java Development Kit, or JDK.) At the same time, Flexible Constructor Bodies (JEP 513) and refinements across the platform support enterprise developers.

Bernard Traversat explained the philosophy: “We know today’s new developers may not have the same patience for complexity. So we wanted to simplify the on-ramp, the ‘Hello World’ experience, without creating dead ends. What you learn on day one scales naturally as you grow, leading all the way up to mission-critical enterprise workloads.”

This balance, approachable for beginners yet robust for veterans, is central to keeping Java relevant in an era where developer preferences shift quickly.

Java 25 in the AI era

The enterprise landscape has changed dramatically, with real-time transactions, AI inference, and data streaming at massive scale. Java 25 responds to this with new concurrency and performance features.

Projects like Loom introduce virtual threads, dramatically simplifying concurrency by removing the need for heavy thread pooling or complex asynchronous programming. Valhalla rethinks how objects and primitives are handled in memory, introducing new numeric types. Babylon enables Java to reach into GPUs and foreign programming models.

“We have positioned Java 25 as AI-ready,” said Arimura, pointing to the Vector API (JEP 508) and Scoped Values (JEP 506). “These are designed to accelerate parallel tasks and computation-heavy workloads, which is critical for AI.” The runtime heritage also matters, he added: “Thirty years of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimisation means applications often get faster out of the box, without developers changing a line of code.”

Beyond features, Java’s role in AI is also about trust. As the executives noted, “Generative AI can now generate a Spring Boot app in seconds. But deploying and monitoring that app in production requires stability. Java provides the ecosystem, frameworks, and runtime to run that code at enterprise scale. For the billions of lines of existing Java code, frameworks like Spring AI, which brings AI abstractions into the Spring ecosystem, and LangChain4j, a library that simplifies large language model (LLM) integration into Java applications, make it possible to add generative AI capabilities without rewrites.”

Preparing for the post-quantum world

Java 25 also lays foundations for the next frontier in security: Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). With advances in quantum computing expected to eventually break today’s encryption protocols, Oracle is proactively building support.

Arimura explained: “Security has always been in Java’s DNA. With quantum computing on the horizon, we have begun implementing post-quantum cryptographic primitives. In Java 24 we delivered JEPs around key encapsulation and digital signatures. In Java 25, we have extended this with the Key Derivation Function API and PEM encodings for cryptographic objects. Once the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) finalises standards for post-quantum Transport Layer Security (TLS), we will integrate them and backport them into long-term supported releases like JDK 11, 17, and 21. Enterprises cannot afford to wait.”

The principle is clear: enterprises should be quantum-ready before the threat arrives, and without paying a performance penalty.

India’s role and the road ahead

While technology anchors Java’s evolution, community sustains it. Oracle executives pointed to India as a vibrant hub. “There are now 14 Java User Groups across cities like Pune, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, and Gujarat, representing nearly 100,000 developers from across tech companies they noted. 

Looking ahead, Oracle reaffirmed its commitment to the six-month release cadence. “We are already shipping early access builds of Java 26. The idea is not disruptive leaps, but thoughtful evolution in smaller increments,” said Chander. “The focus areas are cloud-native applications, concurrency, start-up performance, AI, and, above all, security by default. In a world of billions of autonomous agents, Java’s secure runtime foundation will matter more than ever.”

Java’s flagship developer conference, JavaOne, returns in 2026, another signal of the community heartbeat that Oracle sees as vital for sustaining the language into its fourth decade.

Why Java 25 matters

The Java 25 release delivers 18 JDK Enhancement Proposals (JEPs), spanning language features, concurrency libraries, security upgrades, performance enhancements, and monitoring improvements. These include:

Making Java easier to learn: Compact Source Files, Module Import Declarations

Making Java AI-ready: Structured Concurrency, Scoped Values, Vector API, Compact Object Headers

Making Java future-proof: Key Derivation API, post-quantum cryptography foundations, enhanced JFR monitoring

With long-term support for at least eight years, enterprises can adopt Java 25 at their own pace, backed by quarterly updates until 2028 and extended support through 2033.

“For developers, the promise is clear: Java 25 lowers the entry barrier, accelerates modern workloads, and future-proofs enterprise security, all while staying true to the language’s core philosophy of thoughtful, evolutionary change,” summed up Traversat.