PhillyJUG

Virtual Threads, the central feature of Project Loom, were released as a final feature in JDK 21! As great as virtual threads are, it's just the start of the story for Project Loom. With the vastly reduced cost of creating threads, comes new opportunities.

In this presentation we will look at the two other major features to be delivered by Project Loom; Structured Concurrency and Scoped Values, and how they will significantly improve the developer experience of writing, running, and debugging code the executes concurrently.

About the Speaker
Billy Korando
Billy is a Java Developer Advocate with the Java Platform Group at Oracle. With over a decade of experience in Java, Billy brings a passion for helping developers reduce tedious work, such as project initiation, deployment, testing, and validation, through automation and adopting the latest features and tools in the Java ecosystem. Outside of work, Billy enjoys traveling, playing kickball, and cheering on the Kansas City Chiefs. Billy also co-organizes the Kansas City Java users group.

Java’s relentless six-month release cycle can feel overwhelming. With Java 26 now available, this session cuts through the dry release notes and takes you straight into the trenches. Instead of a standard lecture, we will explore the most impactful new language features and performance upgrades through a highly interactive, "Will it Compile?" style quiz and live code demos. Get ready to test your intuition, spot the edge cases, and see how the latest Java syntax actually behaves under pressure.

Beyond the code, we will tackle the strategy of staying current. Drawing on two decades of experience scaling massive enterprise systems, this talk provides a pragmatic framework for evaluating new Java releases. We will discuss the messy realities of upgrading legacy systems, the architectural trade-offs of adopting preview features, and how to keep your team's skills sharp without succumbing to feature fatigue.
What You Will Learn:

• The Best of Java 26: A practical, code-first breakdown of the most important new capabilities.
• Interactive Code Challenges: Test your knowledge with live quizzes that expose the gotchas and hidden mechanics of the new features.
• The Enterprise Evaluation Framework: How to assess the risk, reward, and migration cost of adopting new updates in large-scale production environments.
• Surviving the Cadence: Actionable strategies for continuous learning in a world where the language updates twice a year.

About the Speaker
Nitin Avula
Nitin Avula is a Senior Principal Staff Engineer at the Social Security Administration (SSA) with over 20 years of experience building enterprise software at scale. A seasoned technical leader deeply rooted in the Java and Spring Boot ecosystems, Nitin specializes in navigating the tension between adopting cutting-edge features and maintaining legacy system stability. Today, he's taking us into the trenches to explore the messy realities, architectural trade-offs, and interactive code challenges of adopting Java 26 in the real world.