JDK 28 firms up: a JSON API in the incubator, and a deprecation notice for Intel Macs

Two OpenJDK proposals were elevated from Candidate to Proposed to Target for JDK 28 in the week covered by InfoQ's August 10, 2026 Java roundup: JEP 540, Simple JSON API (Incubator), and JEP 541, Deprecate the macOS/x64 Port for Removal ^[1][2][3]. One touches the dependency list of nearly every service that speaks HTTP; the other starts an official clock on Intel-based Macs.

The parenthetical in JEP 540's title is the planning story. The JEP defines a simple, standard API for parsing and generating JSON documents without the need for an external library, and implements RFC 8259 ^[4][5]. It also supersedes JEP 198, Light-Weight JSON API, which is now closed and withdrawn ^[6], which is worth remembering before anyone treats this as settled: a built-in JSON API has been proposed in the JDK before and did not ship. The honest read for an operator is that this is worth a spike branch, not a ticket to remove Jackson or Gson. The dependency arithmetic changes when the API leaves the incubator, and that step is not what moved this week ^[3].

JEP 541 is the more consequential item for anyone with hardware or CI in their planning horizon. The JEP proposes to deprecate the macOS/x64 port because Apple no longer supports this architecture, with the intent to remove the port in a future release to save maintenance costs ^[7][8]. The stated model is JEP 449, Deprecate the Windows 32-bit x86 Port for Removal ^[9]. Deprecation is not removal, and no removal release is named ^[8], but the direction is now explicit enough to act on: audit Intel Mac developer machines, macOS/x64 build agents, and any customer-facing artefact you still produce for that target, and decide who pays for the migration and when.

Both proposals are still in review. The JEP 540 review was expected to conclude on Monday, August 17, 2026, seven days after the roundup, and the JEP 541 review on Friday, August 21, 2026, eleven days after ^{[10][11][1][2]}. Meanwhile JDK 28 early access reached build 11, carrying fixes over build 10, while JDK 27 early access remained at build 34 ^[12][13].

There is a mild irony in the timing on the enterprise side. In his Hashtag Jakarta EE blog, Ivar Grimstad, Jakarta EE Developer Advocate at the Eclipse Foundation, reported that Jakarta JSON Binding 3.1 has had an M1 out for a while with an M2 shaping up, and that Jakarta JSON Processing 2.2 is planning an M1 shortly ^[14][15][16]. Jakarta CDI 5.0 is up for release review, and Jakarta RESTful Web Services 5.0 is waiting on three required +1s before its pull requests can merge and an M1 can be produced ^[17][18]. So the platform is moving toward its own JSON API while the EE JSON specifications continue on a separate track, and shops on both will carry two answers to the same question for a while.

The only item on this list that needs attention this week rather than next quarter is Open Liberty 26.0.0.8, whose GA release delivers bug fixes and resolutions for numerous CVEs that can all result in denial of service ^[19]. Among them is CVE-2026-50645, where nothing restricts the number of attachment headers a message can contain when it is deserialized by Apache CXF ^[20].

What to watch: whether the two reviews closed on schedule on August 17 and August 21 ^[10][11]; whether a later JEP names an actual removal release for macOS/x64 rather than a future one ^[8]; and whether JEP 540 gets a second incubator round in JDK 29 or graduates. Until it graduates, keep the JSON library in the build file.