Hashtag Jakarta EE #306

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

I have been home a couple of days now since my trip to Auckland for ChurConf. Next week, I will be participating in two events. First stop is Aveiro, Portugal where I will speak at Aveiro Open Source Connect together with my colleagues André and Rosaria. They will cover how to leverage Open Source in research projects, and I will give an example of how specifications are governed at Eclipse Foundation by using Jakarta EE as an example.

After this, the journey continues to Marrakech and Devoxx Morocco. This will be my 8th time speaking at this conference (including one when it was called JMaghreb). This year, I will co-present Duke on CRaC with Jakarta EE with Rustam. This presentation shows how to leverage CRaC for Jakarta EE applications.

I am happy to announce that the creation review of the Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence specification was approved by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. The Jakarta EE Platform project started discussing the potential inclusion of Jakarta NoSQL 1.1 in Jakarta EE 12. The lacking piece of the puzzle before it is really a candidate is the new standard communication driver. The project is aiming for including this in their Milestone 2 release, wich will happen in the beginning of December. Milestone 2 of Jakarta EE 12 is planned for December 9.

The agenda for JakartaOne Livestream 2025 is live! Check it out and make sure to register for the event so you have it in your calendar. You may also consider to participate in the Jakarta EE in pixels contest. I am sure there will be nice prices to win. For inspiration, you can look at my attempt using the speaker gift from Devnexus 2025.

ChurConf 2025

ChurConf is the a kid on the block when it comes to conferences. CurConf 2025 was the first edition. The single track conference, arranged by some of the folks behind JPrime, took place on Sunday, November 2 in Auckland, New Zealand.

If was a full day of excellent talks presented by top class speakers for an enthusiastic crowd. The benefit of a single-track conference is that all attendees are present in all talks since there aren’t really a hall betwen sessions to get lost in time in. It has been a while since I have listened to every talk at a conference since I usually end up in the hallway track, but with plenty of breaks between sessions, there are still excellent opportunities for networking between sessions.

I presented The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java, which is a trip down the memory lane for Enterprise Java and up until what’s cooking for the future.

I only had a couple of days in Auckland this time, but there was still some time for sightseeing and exploring the city. I also had time for a couple of runs in the nice weather. On Monday, I had lthe pleasure of dining with Phillip Krüger. Among other things, we laid plans for a potential JUG-Tour of Australia. Stay tuned for updates on that.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #305

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

I am currently in Auckland, New Zealand to talk about Jakarta EE at the inagural ChurConf 2025. I will write more about ChurConf after the conference.

The Jakarta EE Platform project has set a date for Milestone 2 of Jakarta EE 12 to be December 9. This milestone will contain all the tasks for are being discussed, and will most likely firm up within the next couple of weeks. These tasks will be added to those of Milestone 1 for those specificitions that didn’t deliver a M1.

The proposal for the Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence specification is now under Creation Review in the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. The review ends on Wednesday, November 5, but so far it looks like it will pass. Judging from the number of community members that has cast their non-binding community votes, this is a hot topic and something the community really wants. On the top of my head, I can’t remember any Jakarta EE specification getting this amount of support from the community.

The agenda for JakartaOne Livestream 2025 is live! Check it out and make sure to register for the event so you have it in your calendar. You may also consider to participate in the Jakarta EE in pixels contest. I am sure there will be nice prices to win. For inspiration, you can look at my attempt using the speaker gift from Devnexus 2025.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #304

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

This week started with a trip to Kraków to present Jakarta EE at JDD 2025. After that, I stopped by the {code and compliance} 2025 event organized by the Open Regulatory and Compliance Working Group. It is very rewarding and interesting to experience events organized by the other working groups at Eclipse Foundation.

Jakarta EE 12 Milestone 1 was accomplished last week. Most of the tasks associated with this milestone were of administrative nature. However, specification projects that wished to publis a milestone release of their specification artifacts were encouraged to do so. Many of them did this, so the Platform will gather these and create a Milestone release of the Platform API artifacts. Check out the various specification pages for details of their progress.

The agenda for JakartaOne Livestream 2025 is live! Check it out and make sure to register for the event so you have it in your calendar.

{code and compliance} 2025

I got the opportunity to attend {code and compliance} 2025 in Brussels. The event was organized by the Open Compliance and Regulatory working group at Eclipse Foundation.

It was an interesting day with presentations, workshops, and panels with topics about and around the Cyber Resillience Act (CRA). Since this is not my usual type of topics, some of the terminology and discussions where a little hard to follow (for me), but it certainly is a valuable experience to follow what’s going on in these forums. I am sure it will benefit the work I do in the Jakarta EE working group if, and when, questions around CRA comes up. A cool tool that was presented is the OCCTET – Self Assessment Portal. This toolkit is a simple way to check if you are complient with CRA with regard to your usage of Open Source software.

A positive side-effect of the event was to be able to meet and hang out with my colleagues. Since Eclipse Foundation is a fully remote organization, it is not that many times we get to meet during the year.

JDD 2025

JDD was one of my first international conferences I spoke at when I started my conference speaker journey. I presented here in 2013 and 2014 before returning this year. This was the 19th edition of JDD, so the conference is definitely among the long running ones. With a little over 600 attendees it is a decently sized event located in beautiful Kraków.

I presented The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java to an enthusiastic crowd. It has proven to be popular presentation over an over again and always triggers good discussions afterwards.

I only had one day at JDD this year, but it was a great one. It started with attending Ed Burns‘ talk about App Modernization more or less directly after I arrived from the airport. Before my talk, I also popped in to Heinz Kabutz‘s talk about Thread Safe Programming. After my talk, I also watched parts of Luqman Saeed‘s talk about Modern Java Security.

A Closer Look at the SKILLAB Project

In my talk at Come To Code 2025 about Advancing Your Career with Open Source, I mentioned the SKILLAB Project. Afterwards, I started thinking that this project is worth some more attention in form of a blog post. This is the result. I hope you will like it.

SKILLAB is a project funded by the European Union. It is aiming to map the skills in supply/demand for job seekers in the EU. The project aims to identify gaps in skills between what the market demands and what the potential workforce can offer. The data gathered can be used to support businesses and recruiters when searching for specific skills.

What intrigues me the most with the SKILLAB project is the possibilities it gives for the open source projects and communities. A common challenge for open source projects is to find new contributors and committers. Where can they find new people that potentially could contribute to the project? And the other way around, how can someone interested in starting a path of contributing to open source identify which project to start with?

This is where SKILLAB comes in. Let’s say that someone who is looking for a job or a new role discovers that they lack a certain skill or skill set for the desired role or position. The algorithms of SKILLAB could then suggest possible open source projects that are looking for help that would help the candidate acquire those skills.

This is a win-win situation.

The open source project and community gets a new contributor, and the contributor acquires the skills needed for the desired new position or role by contributing to the project.

This is kind of the opposite of what the Open Source Communities pilot case is about, but at the same time it is the same data used, so one does not exclude the other.

In addition to the SKILLAB web pages, you can also find information about the project on the Eclipse Foundation project page for SKILLAB.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #303

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

This week I was in Croatia for JavaCro 2025. The conference season isn’t quite over yet. Next week, I will go to Kraków to present Jakarta EE at JDD 2025. Last time I was at JDD was in 2014, so It has been a while since I spoke at this conference.

The ballot for inclusion of Jakarta Query 1.0 in the Jakarta EE Platform and Jakarta EE Web Profile concluded successfully. As a part of Milestone 1 in the Jakarta EE 12 Release Plan, a good portion of specifications published a M1 release of their specification artifact. The Platform team will most likely publish an M1 release of the APIs in near future.

A proposal for a new specification called Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence has been submitted and is now out for public community review. In addition to commenting on the proposal itself, you can also provide input in the EMO tracking issue. The next steps for this specification will be to go through a Creation Review by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. That will be started as soon as the community review is done.

The program for JakartaOne Livestream has been selected and will be published shortly. The 12-hour online event will be on December 2, 2025. Stay tuned for more information the coming weeks.

JavaCro 2025

My first time at JavaCro was a vert pleasant ecperience. I have heard so much about this conference located on an Island off the shore of Croatia. The Island is Sveti Andrija (St. Andrew Island), a 15-minute boat trip from Rovinj.

I had two talks on the first day of the conference. The day started with Tanja‘s talk titled Jakarta EE impact on the Java ecosystem. I was next up with The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. This is a recap of how important Enterprise Java has been, and still is, for Java in general. It is loaded with demoes of some of the new and upcoming features in Jakarta EE.

My second talk was scheduled in the afternoon. This was titled What Spring Developers Should Know About Jakarta EE. This talk goes through how much Spring Framework and J2EE/Java EE/Jakarta EE rely on, and inspire each other.

The island, which is actually two islands connected by a pier, has plenty of opportunities for a dip in the ocean, sights, and trails for walking or running. I took the oportunity for a run around the islands with Daniel Kec on the second day of the conference in the spirit of #runWithJakartaEE.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #302

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

Last week, I was in Orlando for IBM TechXchange 2025. I went directly to this event from dev2next in Colorado Springs. After almost two weeks in the US, I had one night at home continuing to Rovinj in Croatia for JavaCro 2025. Conference season is here, that’s for sure.

The target date, October 15, for Milestone 1 for Jakarta EE 12 is approaching. The only concern is about not being able to stage properly due to the end-of-life of OSSRH. We haven’t been able to get a drop-in replacement for this functionality yet. The solution may be to use snapshots for this milestone, or release milestones without verifying them in staging first.

The program for JakartaOne Livestream has been selected and will be published shortly. The 12-hour online event will be on December 2, 2025. Stay tuned for more information the coming weeks.