The Java platform is moving fast these days, and major new features are being released every six months. Project Panama brings native library access to JVM users. Project Loom introduces microthreading and coroutines into the JVM's concurrency toolkit. Java languages features like type inference and records make code more compact and easy to support. And this is just the beginning. This talk will explore the major features from the last few years of OpenJDK releases, both mainline and experimental, and how they can be leveraged by JVM languages like JRuby to build a better development platform. You'll learn about the leading edge of the JVM and take home some ideas about how you can take advantage of these new features in your own projects.