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Oracle released the last zero-cost public update for the legacy version Java 8 LTS in January 2019 for commercial use, although it will otherwise still support Java 8 with public updates for personal use indefinitely. Other vendors such as Adoptium continue to offer free builds of OpenJDK's long-term support (LTS) versions. These builds may include additional security patches and bug fixes.cite-ref-41[41]

Major release versions of Java, along with their release dates:

| Version | Date |

|---|---|

| JDK Beta | 1995 |

| JDK 1.0 | January 23, 1996 |

| JDK 1.1 | February 19, 1997 |

| J2SE 1.2 | December 8, 1998 |

| J2SE 1.3 | May 8, 2000 |

| J2SE 1.4 | February 6, 2002 |

| J2SE 5.0 | September 30, 2004 |

| Java SE 6 | December 11, 2006 |

| Java SE 7 | July 28, 2011 |

| Java SE 8 (LTS) | March 18, 2014 |

| Java SE 9 | September 21, 2017 |

| Java SE 10 | March 20, 2018 |

| Java SE 11 (LTS) | September 25, 2018 |

| Java SE 12 | March 19, 2019 |

| Java SE 13 | September 17, 2019 |

| Java SE 14 | March 17, 2020 |

| Java SE 15 | September 15, 2020 |

| Java SE 16 | March 16, 2021 |

| Java SE 17 (LTS) | September 14, 2021 |

| Java SE 18 | March 22, 2022 |

| Java SE 19 | September 20, 2022 |

| Java SE 20 | March 21, 2023 |

| Java SE 21 (LTS) | September 19, 2023 |

| Java SE 22 | March 19, 2024 |

| Java SE 23 | September 17, 2024 |

| Java SE 24 | 18 March 2025 |

Sun has defined and supports four editions of Java targeting different application environments and segmented many of its APIs so that they belong to one of the platforms. The platforms are:

• Java Card for smart-cards.cite-ref-java-card-47-0[47]

• Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) – targeting environments with limited resources.cite-ref-java-me-48-0[48]

• Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) – targeting workstation environments.cite-ref-java-se-49-0[49]

• Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) – targeting large distributed enterprise or Internet environments.cite-ref-java-ee-50-0[50]

The classes in the Java APIs are organized into separate groups called packages. Each package contains a set of related interfaces, classes, subpackages and exceptions.

Sun also provided an edition called Personal Java that has been superseded by later, standards-based Java ME configuration-profile pairings.

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