Welcome to issue number three hundred and forty-five of Hashtag Jakarta EE!
Last week, I attended JCrete 2026. You can read all about it in my post from the event. My next event will be JavaZone in the beginning of September, where Jakarta EE will be present on the exhibition floor with a booth.
The first specification targeting Jakarta EE 12 that has filed for a release review is Jakarta CDI 5.0. Congratulations to the project for getting a release ready. Thank you for the great work! Getting the first specification through it’s release review and following release is a great moment for every major Jakarta EE release. Good to know that we are on track!
The Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence specification produced its first Milestone release a couple of weeks ago. This week, they published their refreshed project web page. The page contains a lot of good information about the specification and how it is intended to help build AI agents with Jakarta EE. Check it out and give feedback to the team.
JCrete 2026 was just as good as the previous ones that I have attended, and that has been quite a few. I think my first time was in 2016 or maybe in 2015, but I am not entirely sure. It is a yearly tradition for me now to go to JCrete during summer.
For those that don’t know, JCrete is an unConference. That means that nobody is a speaker, and everybody is a speaker. The program is made up the program as we go, so you never know which themes that will be discussed. The only thing you know is that whatever happens is the right thing, and whatever outcome is the right one.
In addition to the sessions, which are limited to four half-days, there are excursions to nearby beaches, morning runs, walks, bike rides, hiking and diving. Something for everyone’s taste. And if there is something you want to do, it is just to propose it and see if anyone else are interested as well.
And then there is the food…OMG…the food. The lunches at the OAC are worth the trip alone. In the evenings we split up and visit different restaurants and tavernas in the area. One of the nights, there is a Cretan evening with local food and local dansers performing. And on Thursday, we had the traditional JCrete barbeque. Only this year, we couldn’t light the grills due to the extreme dry conditions and fire and fire risk. So the solutions became an old Cretan tradition of using the local bakery oven to prepare the meat and grilled vegetables.
Welcome to issue number three hundred and forty-four of Hashtag Jakarta EE!
This will be a rather short post since it is in the time of the year most people are on vacation or doing something else than reading blogs. This week, I have attended JCrete with lots of regulars and also made friends among the new faces. I will write a more detailed writeup from JCrete later.
The Starter for Jakarta EE has just released a new version with support for Jakarta EE 11. You can use the starter to quickly get started by generating a new Jakarta EE project. You can choose to create a plain project with no runtime configuration, or you can choose to get your project fully configured for one of the implementations of Jakarta EE 11. You can also get the Dockerfile generated for you. Please give it a try and tell us what you think.
Welcome to issue number three hundred and forty-three of Hashtag Jakarta EE!
I have been home a week since JConf Dominicana 2026, and today I am setting course for Crete to be a part of JCrete 2026. This unconference in the Mediterranean in the middle of summer has become a tradition for me since I first attended more than ten years ago.
Even if the summer holidays are upon us, the Jakarta EE Platform project continues to meet every Tuesday in the Platform call. There is a bit of progress in the Jakarta RESTful Web Services project now, so it seems like they will be able to publish a milestone soon with the changes needed to deprecate and eventually remove the custom component model in favor of CDI. A final release will be available for Jakarta EE 12.
The limits that were recently introcuced for publication to Maven Central is stirring up the open source community. There are discussions among the Java Champions for how to cope with this. A suggestion that a vendor-neutral model like the one for Open VSX may be a possible way forward should it continue to be a problem. Good to know is that projects hosted at Eclipse Foundation currently have no limitations for publishing artifacts to Maven Central.
A little over a week ago, the Java Documentary by CultRepo titled The Java Story was released. You should really watch it to get a glimpse of this amazing community and ecosystem around Java. I am also pleased to be featured in the documentary. Not a big part, but I am there representing the community, Jakarta EE, Eclipse Foundation, Enterprise Java, and open source in general.
This was my third time speaking at JConf Dominicana, so I am practically a regular by now.
The community spirit is so present at this conference. As I wrote last year, I think it is the only conference I have been to where the attendees immediately put on the conference T-shirt they get at registration. Everybody walking around in matching shirts strengthens the feeling of belonging to the community. The attendees are a mix of students and professionals from the area. Most of the speakers are from Central America, but there are always a couple from other parts of the World as well.
This year’s conference started with JakartaOne Dominican Republic as a day-zero event on Thursday. Then there was a full day of workshops on Friday before the regular conference on Saturday. My talk was right after the opening session. I talked about Augmenting AI with the Power of Jakarta EE. The room was full, and there were good questions and conversations following the talk.
After the talk, I stayed for the hallway track. It is very inspiring to talk to young developers. Get their perspective on things, as well as (hopefully) being able to give some good advice and insights. A couple of the students were very eager to get involved in open source, so I pointed them to the mentorship program we have with Jakarta EE.
Welcome to issue number three hundred and forty-two of Hashtag Jakarta EE!
I am currently at JConf Dominicana 2026. I will post a separate post about the conference shortly. But I will mention the session I am attending right now, which is a presentation about floci by Hector Ventura. In short, floci is a drop-in replacement for LocalStack that lets you emulate any cloud environment locally.
As usually in July, the Jakarta EE platform project slows down a little. But the weekly platform call still happens for those not on vacation yet, or already back from theirs. I think it is important to keep the discussions going, even with a little less people present than usually. To keep the drumbeat going, sort of speak.
Yesterday I attended JakartaOne Dominican Republic.The event gathered a full room of around 40 attendees on a Thursday evening. This was the first JakartaOne in the Caribbean, but is certainly won’t be the last. The Java community all over the LATAM region is very active and vibrant, and the JakartaOne In-person event format fits very well.
After Eudris Cabrera kicked off the event, there were talks by Java Community leaders across the region. Diego Silva Limaco from Peru first presented how to get from zero to production in no time with Jakarta EE. He also presented the Jakarta Coffee Builder Plugin, an open source project of his that generates code and configuration on the fly using Maven. It sort of mimics the features provided by popular developer tools, such as Quarkus. A very cool project that I would take a look at if I were you.
Vicente Suc from Guatemala presented how to use technologies such as Testcontainers and Flyway to test Jakarta EE applications. He also pitched the local conference JConf Guatemala 2026 which will be on November 7 this year.
I had the honour of holding the closing session of the conference. I presented a brief history of enterprise Java, and Jakarta EE in particular before opening up the floor for an ask-me-anything session. There were lots of good questions and comments that continued during the pizza and drinks provided afterward.
A great event, a great community, a great experience!
Welcome to issue number three hundred and forty-first of Hashtag Jakarta EE!
Even if July traditionally is a rather slow month regarding conferences, I have a couple coming up next week. On Thursday, I will give the closing session on JakartaOne Dominican Republic 2026. I will provide a little history and future directions of Jakarta EE, as well as opening up the mic for an ask-me-anything session. This event is a so-called day-zero event before the JConf Dominicana 2026. I have a talk there about various agentic augmentation techniques for integration with AI models from Jakarta EE applications. This will be my third year in a row speaking at this conference.
One of the most important aspects when Jakarta EE was established at the Eclipse Foundation was that the Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs) were open sourced. Especially now that AI is doing most of the coding. If it is anything these tools thrive on, it is well-structured specifications and tests, as I touched upon in Will AI Kill Open Source?.
Vidocq is the first sovereign European Jakarta EE Core Profile 11 and MicroProfile 7.1 runtime, built on JDK 25. And it is almost entirely built with AI. At least most of the heavy lifting. But the accuracy and unforgiving nature of the TCK suite also required a great deal of effort from Yann Blazart and Antoine Sabot-Durand.
These two gentlemen have a long history with the technology and know what they are doing. Remember, AI is like a junior developer in constant need of supervision and direction from experienced senior architects. I don’t think anyone can generate a Jakarta EE implementation from scratch (yet), but if you have some experience in the field, these specs are well-written and come with an excellent test suite. Just saying…food for AI.
Don’t forget that the CFP for JakartaOne Livestream 2026 is open. It closes on September 8, but don’t wait until then to submit your talk. Get it done before the summer vacations, so you have one less thing to think of when returning to work.
Last week, I had the pleasure of being part of the Code the Continuum Hackathon which took place at the University of Gagliari on Sardinia, Italy. The location itself is worth the visit, so I definitely understand the choice of venue. The two-day hackathon was held at the university campus with approximately 50 attendees registered. I had created a challenge where the participants would create a Jakarta EE application that integrated with an LLM to produce an Hourglass Model of a given domain and use case. The task was to give the LLM enough context to produce an accurate model using agentic augmentation techniques.
Five of the 10 teams signed up for the Jakarta EE Hourglass Model challenge out of which four of them finished. The teams were allowed to participate in multiple challenges, so there were some overlap between them. All teams did a fabolus job and it was not an easy task to select the three winners for our challenge. At the end, it boiled down to how well they were using the Jakarta EE APIs and the libraries provided to integrate with the LLM. And, of course, how accurate the generated Hourglass Model was.
The three winning teams were: 🥇 Cache & Release 🥈 AI/AB Users 🥉 Cyber Guys
The winning team, Team Cache & Release, created a generic solution where they incorporated guardrails for the quality of the generated model. They augmented the LLM with Tools using Jakarta EE and LangChain4J and generated a nice visual representation of the resulting Hourglass Model.
Team AI/AB Users got second place for their solution where they used Jakarta EE and MicoProfile in combination with LangChain4J-CDI to implement Tools, RAG and Guardrails for their model generation. They also created a visual representation of the model.
On third place, Team Cyberguys, used CDI Producers in combination with LangChain4J-CDI. They used advanced prompting to assure the quality of the model. They used metrics from a car to analyze and generate an Hourglass Model for the economy and safety of a driver. I discovered this functionality in the rental car I had, so it is definitely a relevant use case for SDV (Software Defined Vehicle).
Welcome to issue number three hundred and fortieth of Hashtag Jakarta EE!
The Code the Continuum hackathon was a very inspiring event with lots of excellent solutions using Jakarta EE, AI among other things. I will shortly publish a blog post about the event. It is incredible what a team of students can come up with and produce during a couple of days of collaboration.
Jakarta EE 12 is progressing with expeced updates in the form of milestones coming up shortly for Jakarta Security and Jakarta Faces. Among other things, Jakarta Security is adding (or formalising) integration with Jakarta RESTful Web Services in the specification. Since we are in the summer and vacation period for the northern hemisphere, it is even more important to make sure your favourite specification project does not loose momentum in this period. Make sure to leave the project in a good state when taking some well deserved time off. Go through the issue tracker and do a little triage to mark up issues where you want help, or those that are good for first time contributors.
