Hashtag Jakarta EE #354

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

This week I used IBM Bob to convert the Spring Pet Clinic to Jakarta EE Duck Clinic. I spent all my 100 Bobcoins from the IBM Champions program to get a working version on Open Liberty, and I am waiting for my next 50 to continue adding functionality and runtimes. I will follow up in a separate blog post later. Until then, feel free to check out the Jakarta EE Duck Clinic on GitHub.

The focus for the Jakarta EE Platform project right now is making sure the updated specifications are starting to get ready for their release reviews. The planned release date for Jakarta EE Core Profile is still December 1, so we can celebrate it on JakartaOne Livstream 2026.

Next week, I am going to Lone Tree, Colorado, to speak at dev2next 2026. I will present my talk about AI augmentation techniques with Jakarta EE. This conference has an amazing speaker lineup, and I look forward to attending the talks and all the hallway conversations in between.

Herding Ducks with IBM Bob

I first tried IBM Bob about a year ago when I got a preview license to try it out before the launch at IBM TechXchange 2025. It was cool, but didn’t really strike me as something I would use on a regular basis. Through the IBM Champions program, I now have premium access with the Java Modernization package bundled. This is a package tailored to Java upgrades and migrations. Not really the thing I am doing, so I have to nudge Bob now and then to give me newer versions and in some cases beta-versions. Bob, in this mode, is inclined to prefer the stable and supported versions. Which makes perfectly sense for wha the package is for. Maybe there is a Modern Java package that pushes Bob a little more toward the bleeding edge of things?

To try out the modernization and migration theme, I prompted Bob to create a Jakarta EE version of the Spring Pet Clinic. Midway through, I decided to make my version a little more duck-oriented and instructed Bob to rename everyhing from “pet” to “duck”, and of course use DuckDB.

My Bobcoins really got wings and flew away faster than any duck can fly. Luckily, the IBM Champions program lets us request more Bobcoins when we run out of them, so I got 50 more assigned to my account. I have no idea what that translates to in money. Frankly, I don’t really get this invent-your-own-money kind of thing. I guess it is coming from the gaming world, where each game has its own form of currency. Since I am not a vivid gamer, I kind of feel it would be better do just call a duck for a duck and display the cost in a currency that we all can relate to.

Anyway, 100 Bobcoins later I now have a working Jakarta EE Duck Clinic. Check out the screenshot below, or get the code from GitHub and try it out on your machine. The last 22 were used when I asked Bob to make it run on WildFly, so I never got to Payara Micro. The problem Bob got stuck on was that apparently there is an issue with ByteBuddy/Hibernate on Java 27. Of course, I could have backed to a supported version, but, as I said in the start, I want the latest and greatest. That’s what the Ducks expect, so that’s what I have to do.

All in all, my experience with Bob was good, and I can’t wait until my IBM Champions account is filled up with another 50 Bobcoins.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #353

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

Last week, I celebrated seven years at Eclipse Foundation, so here is the first update in my eighth year. On Friday, I was in Walldorf for the second of the two annual face-to-face meetings in the JCP Executive Committee.

Speaking about the Executive Committee, the 2026 JCP Executive Committee elections are ongoing, and Eclipse Foundation is running in the elections to retain our seat on the EC. The ballots open on November 3 and closed on November 16. Around that time, you will receive information about how to vote if you are eligible to vote. I hope you will consider voting for Eclipse Foundation.

For Jakarta EE 12, the vote for including Jakarta Authorization in Jakarta EE Web Profile is ongoing. It makes perfect sense to groiup it together with the other security specifications there. On request from the steering committee, the timeline for Jakarta EE 12 was discussed and firmed up in the platform call this week.The timeline for Jakarta EE 12 will look like this:

  • December 1 – Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile
  • March 31 – Jakarta EE 12 Web Profile
  • May 15 – Jakarta EE 12 Platform

One specification I, personally, really want to see included in Jakarta EE 12 Web Profile is Jakarta NoSQL. Simplifying and standardizing access to NoSQL datastores is a great feature when integrating artificial intelligence in enterprise applications. Particularly, support for vector databases for RAG is something that will be very useful. If you agree with me, or have an opinion about including Jakarta NoSQL in Jakarta EE 12, please do let us know on the mailing list or in the platform calls. The voice of the community matters!

The Call for Papers for Open Community Experience 2027 is open. Make sure to submit your talk early and often for a better chance of getting accepted. Open Community Experience, or OCX for short will take place in Brussels, April 13-15 next year. Of course, you can submit talks to any of the tracks, but if you have a Jakarta EE talk in mind, I suggest that you submit it to the Modern Software Development track.

JCP EC F2F Walldorf 2026

The Executive Committee of the Java Community Process meets face-to-face twice each year. The various member companies of the committee are offered to host these meetings in their offices. This time, it was SAP that hosted us in Walldorf, Germany.

Since the rest of the meetings are done online, these face-to-face meetings are very valued. Only one of the Executive Committee members were not able to join this time, so we had a full house. In addition to the regular agenda items, we also had presentation both in-person in the room as well as remote ones. These included updates from the various OpenJDK projects as well as real-life use cases from big users of Java, such as Netflix, as well as presentations from Java User Groups in Europe and Brazil.

The day before the meeting, many of the Executive Committee members visited the local University to talk about Java in AI with faculty and students. Unfortunately, I was not able to join this visit since I was traveling. But I did visit the JUG event in the evening. This was a joint event by JUG Darmstadt, JUG Mannheim, and JUG Karlsruhe.

Peppe the Penguin

Celebrating 7 Years at the Eclipse Foundation

Today marks seven years since I joined the Eclipse Foundation as the Jakarta EE Developer Advocate. Looking back, it has been an amazing journey filled with community, collaboration, innovation, and more conference talks, webinars, podcasts, and flights than I can count.

The best part of my role is the connection with the communty and the people. From specification leads and committers to user group leaders, conference organisers, and developers around the world, the Jakarta EE community continues to demonstrate what open collaboration can achieve. Every conversation, contribution, and piece of feedback helps move this ecosystem forward.

Community matters, always had, always will, especially in these days where AI is taking over many of the tasks we considered as being key to our success. Such as the art of coding. But technology cannot replace the human connections that are at the heart of the community. Conversations in the hallways, discussions over coffee, conference meetups, and spontaneous brainstorming sessions build the trust, spark the ideas, and create the relationships that helps move the Java community and Jakarta EE forward.

Open source is ultimately about people, and as AI becomes more capable, the value of talking, interacting, socialising, and building the community only becomes greater. The future belongs not only to those who master the technology, but also to those who strengthen the human networks around it.

Thank you all for being part of this journey. Looking forward to the next seven years!

Hashtag Jakarta EE #352

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

The proposal for the Jakarta CRaC specification is out for community review. Next week, the Jakarta EE Specification Committee will kick off the creation review according to the Jakarta EE Specification Process.

The program for JakartaOne Livesteam 2026 has been selected and the speakers notified. It will be published as soon as the sehceduling is done. It is kind of a puzzle to get the flow of the program to fit with the speaker’s schedules since we are spread over so many time zones. But we have done this a couple of times now, so it shouldn’t take too long. In the meantime, you can register for the event.

The Jakarta EE Platform project is getting ready for the upcoming release of Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile. The plan is to release before JakartaOne Livestream on December 1st. The specification document is being updated as we speak, Jakarta CDI 5.0 is released, the JSON specifications are pretty much ready, and Jakarta REST is getting close to publishing a milestone release. Join the weekly Jakarta EE Platform calls to stay up-to-date with the progress.

The Call for Papers for Open Community Experience 2027 opens on Monday, September 28. Make sure to submit your talk early and often for a better chance of getting accepted. Open Community Experience, or OCX for short will take place in Brussels, April 13-15 next year. Of course, you can submit talks to any of the tracks, but if you have a Jakarta EE talk in mind, I suggest that you submit it to the Modern Software Development track.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #351

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

This week, I was touring the US East Coast with Gerrit from Azul. We visited Philly JUG, Garden State JUG, and New York Java SIG. It was a great trip with lots of engagement with the Java community. Between the talks we had the opportunity to sit down and finalise a proposal for a new Jakarta specification, namely Jakarta CRaC. We have talked about it for a while and decided to make the proposal when Azul acquired Payara earlier this year. The proposal will likely be out for community review shortly.

Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile will be released in December this year. The Web Profile and Platform specifications are planned to be released in Q1 and Q2 next year, so the Jakarta EE Platform project now also focuses on gathering feedback from the participating specifications. It is also expected that the team will run a vote to include Jakarta NoSQL 1.1 in Jakarta EE 12. When that happens, the community is encouraged to participate in that vote and give input even if only the committer’s votes will be binding.

The Call-for-Paper for JakartaOne Livestream has closed and the Program Committee is working on reviewing the proposals. As soon as they are ready and the speakers have been notified, the program will be published. You can always go ahead and register for the conference so you are sure not to miss any important updates.

The Call for Paper for Open Community Experience 2027 opens on Monday, September 28. Make sure to submit your talk early and often for a better chance of getting accepted. Open Community Experience, or OCX for short will take place in Brussels, April 13-15 next year. Of course, you can submit talks to any of the tracks, but if you have a Jakarta EE talk in mind, I suggest that you submit it to the Modern Software Development track.

New York Java SIG 2026

After two busy days of traveling, we spent the day touring Manhattan before the third and last stop on the 2026 US JUG Tour . This night, Gerrit and I spoke at the New York Java SIG in front of an enthusiastic crowd. The weather, not too hot and not raining, was on our side. Which meant a full house. The pizza was good, the mood was great, and we had a really good time.

As with the previous days, Gerrit started with his presentation Prompt and Pray where he walked us through the steps of creating a Jakarta EE application with AI coding agents. He compared the agents and showed the benefits of having the well-written Jakarta EE specifications as sort of guardrails for the agents to ensure a consistent, lean code base.

I followed up with my presentation about Augmenting AI with the Power of Jakarta EE. I first gave a short history lesson, then an overview of Jakarta EE 11 before walking through a bunch of augmentation techniques to make the LLMs less stupid and more predictable. The session is mostly based on code samples, so it is a fun talk to do.

Garden State JUG 2026

The second stop on the 2026 US JUG Tour was Garden State JUG. We did the same talks as we did at Philly JUG the day before, but with slight variations since the audience at this JUG is a little different. Most of the participants are students at the university, so we both did some small adjustments to our talks,

I shortened down my talk a little, so they are more targeting the AI topic and less introduction slides. It fits a little better and gives me more time for the demos, which are the main draw of this presentation anyway. Gerrit did a little more explaining the concept of Spec-Driven-Development before jumping into the part of prompting the creation of a Jakarta EE application.

Next stop on the tour is New York JavaSIG.

Philly JUG 2026

This Monday, I visited the Philly JUG together with Gerrit from Azul. In his talk From Prompt to Code, he talked about how to create an application from scratch using AI. He pointed coding agents, such as Claude and IBM Bob as well as regular ChatGPT to the Jakarta EE specifications and told them to keep within the boundaries of the specifications. It turned out that the output from the different AI tools were very similar, which is due to the nature of the specifications, thus achieving a repeatable process and AI vendor independence.

In my talk titled Augmenting AI with the Power of Jakarta EE, I went through several agentic approaches to augment the LLM using Jakarta EE and LangChain4J-CDI. I also gave a short overview of Jakarta EE and Jakarta EE 11 to set the stage.

This was the first stop of our 2026 US JUG Tour. Next up is Garden State JUG.