Hashtag Jakarta EE #324

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-four of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Last week, I was at JavaLand 2066. It was my eleventh time at this conference. This year, it was back in a theme park again with almost 1500 attendees registered. Next week, I will go to California for JavaOne which is located for the second time at the Oracle conference center in Redwood Shores. I am not going to be a speaker this year, but in some way I am anyway since I will be hosting a mentoring session in the JavaOne Mentorship Hub. After that, I will also be present at Voxxed Days Amsterdam where Jakarta EE will have a booth in the Community Square.

Jakarta EE 12 moves along. The release is planned for Q4, 2026, but there is no reason to wait until then to try out some of the new features. Jakarta Persistence 4.0 has released a Milestone 1 that is implemented in Hibernate 8.0.0.alpha1. I am also working on a SkillsJar for Jakarta EE. Of course, I will let you know immediately when I have it ready.

If you are interested in attending Open Community eXperience in Brussels this April, please reach out to me for a 30% discount code. This is an opportunity to meet the rest of the quite diverse Eclipse Foundation community.

JavaLand 2026

JavaLand 2026 was finally back in the theme park after the last two year’s disaster at a car racing track. And this was good. Europa Park is different from Phantasialand, but has the same kitchy, German way of going all in being true to the theme. From the African and Chinese vibes in Phantasialand, we were now in Italy, Spain, France, and Marrakech. All mixed together in a way only possible in Germany.

1493 attendees is a very good number for a conference these days. And the German Java community is very vibrant and opinionated, so it is almost impossible to go from one end of the exhibition floor to another without stopping for a couple of conversations on the way. In my opinion, these hallway track conversations are the most important part of a conference, and JavaLand has a lot of them.

My talk, The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java, was set up in the Dome, which seats 700 people. It is hard to know the number of occupied chairs, but I estimate it to be somewhere between 100 and 150 attending my talk.

In the evening on the first day, the park opened up a couple of the attractions. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm passed by at that time, so going on a rollercoaster didn’t really tempt me. Dinner at one of the restaurants was a much better option. I don’t really like rollercoasters anyway, but that is a secret 🙂

One thing I missed year was the traditional JavaLand Jogging on Wednesday morning. Since I had arrived to the European time zone only a day before I travelled to JavaLand, I managed well without it. I did go for a short run on Thursday morning before breakfast, though.

Devnexus 2026

I can’t believe this was the ninth time I was a speaker at Devnexus. The last couple of years, we have sponsored and had a dedicated Jakarta EE track and the entire team present, so it was a bit different to be handling the booth as the only one from Eclipse Foundation present. This time, we shared the booth with MicroProfile in the community area. Luckily, I had great help from our community with staffing the booth. Mike, Emily, Rustam, Eudris, and Fred all helped out making it successful.

My talk, What Spring Developers Should Know About Jakarta EE, is a fairly popular talk that I have done a couple of times now. It was well attended and I received great feedback from the attendees afterward.

As always, the most important track at Devnexus is the Hallway Track. It is amazing how many good conversation it is possible to have over a few days when you hang out with 1400 attendees, speakers, volunteers, and others over a couple of days.

And, of course, we had the traditional #runWithJakartaEE morning runs. We usually run around the Mercedes Benz Stadium before finishing up the 5km in Centennial Olympic Park. The park is closed when we start running at 6:30AM, but opens up at 7:00AM, and that is about the time we return from the loop around the stadium.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #323

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-three of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Right now, I am on my way home from Devnexus 2026. It was as busy as always, so I haven’t been able to finish up my post from the event, but I promise that it will be out there shortly. I will only have 24 hours at home this time before I am headed to JavaLand 2026. They have changed venue again and is going to be in Europa-Park in southern Germany. Hopefully this change of venue will be more successful than the last couple of editions at Nürburgring.

Another thing that hapened last week was that I became an IBM Champion. It makes sense since I am often using IBM technology such as Open Liberty in my demos at conferences around the World. Since I am new to the program, I don’t really know what it will mean, but I am excited to find outl.

The work on Jakarta EE 12 continues. In the weekly platform call, the progress is discussed and the projects for the individual component specifications report on what they are focusing at the moment. Due to inactivity in some of the projects, and recent layoffs among our member companies, the team is discussing how to bring on new committers and get them up to speed as fast as possible.

If you are still waiting for the follow-up post from my Will AI Kill Open Source post a couple of weeks ago, don’t despair. I have so much material for the next post and just need a little breathing room to organise my thoughts. In the context of this theme, I have done some pretty cool experiments that I am very eager to share once they are in a sharable state. Stay tuned…

Hashtag Jakarta EE #322

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-two of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I was in Montreal for ConFoo. The conference season is over us, and already next week, I will be in Atlanta for Devnexus. At Devnexus, I will be managing the Jakarta EE booth in addition to speaking and attending the JUG Leader’s Summit and the Java Champions Summit. Devnexus is the premier Java conference in the US. I am looking so much forward to meeting old and new friends there.

Last week, I wrote Will AI Kill Open Source? While writing it, I decided that it is probably going to be enough material for several posts, turning it into a blog series. Stay tuned for the next post in the series.

Finally, it seems like the topic of AI is popping op on the agenda of the Jakarta EE Platform call again. When I started bringing it up about a year ago, there was a fair amount of skepticism so I am happy to see that it was discussed in last week’s call even if I wasn’t present. Things are moving so fast these days and it is important to position Jakarta EE in all of this. Maybe a start could be to create an opinionated MCP server for Jakarta EE. Or maybe a SkillsJar for Jakarta EE? We won’t know unless we discuss it. By the way, SkillsJars is a project by James Ward where skills for agents are packaged as JARs and distributed via Maven Central. I will definitely write more about it in a later post.

ConFoo 2026

This was my fifth time speaking at ConFoo in Montreal. This year, there were around 800 attendees, which brings them close to the peak years before the pandemic. I am happy to see and experience the vibrant developer community in Montreal. The conference was originally a PHP conference, but now covers multiple languages and technologies. Of course, the ever present topic of AI was prevalent here as well this year. I had some very interesting discussions with Kito Mann and Andrew Lombardi among others.

Amazon offered 500 free credits for Kiro at their booth, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. Kiro offers spec-driven development, and it provided comprehensive high- and low-level designs, requirements, and associated tasks to implement them. First, I prompted it to create an MCP server for Jakarta EE. After about 200 credits, it delivered something. I am not sure if it is actually what I asked for, but it was pretty impressive.

My second try is still running. I gave it the task of providing an implementation of Jakarta Data 1.1 that will work with Apache OpenJPA and passes the TCK. It will be extremely interesting to see how this goes. I will write about it in the blog series about AI and Open Source that I started last week.

My first talk was The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. It is a good talk and usually gets positive reactions from the attendees. This was no exception. The feedback that was given on the analog paper feedback forms were very good.

The next day, I presented What Spring Developers Should Know About Jakarta EE. This is also a good talk, even if I am not as comfortable with it as the previous one. However, it was extremely well liked and got even better reviews from the attendees. I ran a little out of time at the end as the sessions at ConFoo are 45 minutes, so I am actually looking forward to giving it next week at Devnexus where I will have 60 minutes to my disposal.

On the last day, I had the pleasure of meeting Bazlur. As he pointed out in his post on X, ConFoo is where we meet up every other year when we both are speaking there. Always nice to meet our good community members in person.

Will AI Kill Open Source?

Will AI kill Open Source? Is it already happening? Or is this just another clickbait title? Well, let’s see. First of all, I am writing this by hand without the help of any artificial intelligence. There is only human intelligence involved here. I will leave it up to you to judge the quality of it, but at least it is real.

I don’t think AI will kill Open Source. It is not about it not being capable of it. I think it is more that we are not going to allow it to happen. Why should we suddenly abandon all practices of reuse and use of proven implementations and libraries over reinventing the wheel ourselves? Why would we let AI rewrite algorithms and functionality that are already implemented in open source projects, verified, and proven to work? That’s where human intelligence comes in. Abandoning all sound practices of software engineering just because we suddenly have a new developer-kid-on-the-block that can vomit out code faster than any human in history? I don’t think so.

After all, human intelligence is human

After all, human intelligence is human. We know that we sometimes make mistakes. AI doesn’t. AI is never wrong unless a human points out that it is. How does this relate to open source again? What if we didn’t have to point out to the AI that it was wrong? What if we got the AI to use components and building blocks from open source libraries and APIs that are verified to be correct? Isn’t that the strength of open source? That multiple human brains have been involved in creating it in collaboration. So, in order to feed the AI with secure, stable, correct building blocks, we need open source.

If there is one thing AI is good at, it is following specifications. Maybe implementations can be generated by AI if the specifications are well-defined enough. Especially if the specifications come with a comprehensive test suite to verify that an implementation implements it correctly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a set of high-quality, widely adopted, interoperable specifications with associated test suites?

Luckily, we do! And that is what Jakarta EE is all about. I will elaborate more on this in future posts. I see that this post is starting to get a little long, so it may be that this will be the first in a series of posts on this topic.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #321

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-one of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

As this post comes out, I have just arrived home from DeveloperWeek 2026 in San Jose, California. I will now spend a couple of days at home before going to Montreal for ConFoo 2026. I look forward to presenting at this conference for the fifth time.

When drifting just a little outside the sphere of Java-focused conference, it is very apparent that Java is perceived as being a legacy language. Most of these developers (or do they identify as vibe-prompters these days?) are not aware of the progress made by Java to make it the number one platform for AI workloads. The performance of the JVM alone should be convincing enough, but these days when quality is measured by quantity (in lines of code), it is easy to forget the fundamentals of software architecture.

Bruno Borges has put together a bunch of patterns that showcases how modern Java differs from the old style, including how Enterprise Java has evolved from the old J2EE to modern Jakarta EE.

In the minutes from last week’s Jakarta EE Platform call, the content for Jakarta EE 12 Milestone 3 is outlined. All specifications are expected to update their parent pom.xml to the newly released EE4J Parent 2.0.0 which contains the configuration needed to be able to stage artifacts before releasing to Maven Central the same way we used to be able to do with OSSRH (which was retired last year).

By the way. If you were ever in doubt, this blog is, and will always be, 100% written by me. There is no AI involved, which you probably can tell by the spelling errors and (mostly) readable language. No generated slop here, only potentially sloppy human mistakes.

DeveloperWeek 2026

This was my second time as a speaker at DeveloperWeek. This time it was located in San Jose, California. It is still a fairly well attended event, but it felt a little smaller this time than when I attended three years ago. The focus is a bit different than the usual conferences I attend and speak at. I don’t think I have had to explain what Eclipse Foundation is and does as often at any conference before.

I presented The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java on the first day of the conference. As the main conference started on Thursday, this was practically a day-zero event with separate passes and potentially a different audience.

The talks on the first day are called workshops, but are really regular 50-minutes long technical sessions. For the rest of the conference, the session length is 25 minutes, so in that regard speaking on this day is better. It is really hard to give a good technical talk in 25 minutes. The downside is that there is a little fewer attendees on this day than on the first conference day. But still a decent outcome.

My talk went well, all demos worked, and I got some good questions and chats afterwards.

On Friday, I was part of a panel regarding “Low cost, big impact marketing”. The panel was moderated by Stephen Chin from Neo4j. All the panelists had roles within developer relations, or developer marketing if you like.

We talked about the importance of being present at conferences, where the developers are, the importance of the hallway track.

Another topic we discussed where how to nurture and scale the community around the product/project/technology we are advocating for.

An interesting touch by Steve at the end was to do the Q&A on the floor among the attendees and not on the stage. That way everyone can ask their question to the panelist they wanted rather than having to listen to all panelists responding to someone else’s question.

The best part of attending a conference is meeting and catching up with old and new friends. The hallway track…

JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG 2026

When I Code Java was cancelled with short notice,Phillip, Buhake and I scrambled and created a substitute event. With funds from the Eclipse Foundation concept of Open Community Meetup and the organisation of Jozi-JUG, we created JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG where Phillip and I presented. The event had 208 registered attendees.

I started the evening by presenting The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. Phillip took over after me and presented AI with (and in) Quarkus. We were hosted by Investec, who also provided food and drinks for us. After the talks prices and swag were raffled out to the attendees. This is always very appreciated.

This was the first JakartaOne by [JUG] we have done, but it certainly won’t be the last. We even discussed turning it into a half-day or full-day conference and brand it as JakartaOne South Africa or JakartaOne Johannesburg next year.