Old version, no longer maintained: J2SE 1.2 Old version, no longer maintained: JDK 1.1 Old version, no longer maintained: JDK 1.0 Java 21, the latest (4th) LTS, was released on September 19, 2023. In the case of OpenJDK, both commercial long-term support and free software updates are available from multiple organizations in the broader community. Oracle also continues to release no-cost public Java 17 LTS updates for all users, including commercial and production use until September 2024. Oracle continues to release no-cost public Java 8 updates for development and personal use indefinitely. Regarding Oracle Java SE Support Roadmap, version 21 is the latest one, and versions 21, 17, 11 and 8 are the currently supported long-term support (LTS) versions, where Oracle Customers will receive Oracle Premier Support. Some programs allow conversion of Java programs from one version of the Java platform to an older one (for example Java 5.0 backported to 1.4) (see Java backporting tools). Entire new APIs, such as Swing and Java2D, have been introduced, and many of the original JDK 1.0 classes and methods have been deprecated.

In addition to the language changes, other changes have been made to the Java Class Library over the years, which has grown from a few hundred classes in JDK 1.0 to over three thousand in J2SE 5. This proposal took effect for all following versions, and is still the current release schedule. In September 2017, Mark Reinhold, chief Architect of the Java Platform, proposed to change the release train to 'one feature release every six months' rather than the then-current two-year schedule.

The language is specified by the Java Language Specification (JLS) changes to the JLS are managed under JSR 901. Since J2SE 1.4, the evolution of the Java language has been governed by the Java Community Process (JCP), which uses Java Specification Requests (JSRs) to propose and specify additions and changes to the Java platform. The Java language has undergone several changes since JDK 1.0 as well as numerous additions of classes and packages to the standard library. This article is about the Java programming language.

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