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

The last couple of weeks were pretty busy with events in four different countries on two continents. The upcoming week, I only have one event, and that is within cycling distance. I will present Augmenting AI with the Power of Jakarta EE at the Malmö JUG, aka Javaforum Malmö.

In the Jakarta EE Platform project call this week, we discussed the status of the fourth Milestone of Jakarta EE 12. The four specifications that are being updated for Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile (Jakarta RESTful Web Services, Jakarta JSON Binding, Jakarta JSON Processing, and Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection) are in a pretty good state and will be able to deliver at least milestone releases or even release candidates within the Milestone 5 timeline. There was also talk about an update to Jakarta Annotations, but that is not likely to happen in this release. We discussed pulling this specification in under the control of the Jakarta EE Platform project since it is providing platform-wide annotations, and does not necessarily need a project on its own.

If you are up for a cool read, check out this post by Graeme Rocher where he writes about how he uses AI Tooling to implement Jakarta EE specifications in Micronaut with the goal of reaching Jakarta EE 11 Core Profile compatibility. This exemplifies how well-written specifications are food for AI and takes spec-driven development to another level. I am looking forward to following the progress on this effort.

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

I am falling a little behind on the event posts, but I assure you that I will post reports from ShiftAPPens and JavaConnect KE shortly. In the meantime, check out this update from the GlassFish project. Among other things, GlassFish 9.0.0-M2 is updated with Jakarta EE 12 implementation and Jakarta REST integration with Jakarta Authorization.

Another item in my backlog is also to write the continuation of my article about AI and open source. It is starting to materialize in my mind, so it shouldn’t last too long before I am ready to write it up. Note that I am not using any AI tooling to write my posts. I take pride in my work, and don’t want to go down that path.

The progress for the specifications that have been asked to produce updates for Milestone 4 of Jakarta EE 12 looks very promising. Check out the minutes from this week’s call for the details. Another piece of good news regarding Jakarta EE 12 is that the Jakarta NoSQL project may be able to merge the features planned for Jakarta NoSQL 1.2 in Jakarta NoSQL 1.1. That means that it will certainly be a stronger candidate for inclusion in Jakarta EE 12.

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

I am currently in Coimbra, Portugal, for ShiftAPPens 2026. This is the ninth edition of this hackathon that is organised by and for students. As a Gold sponsor, Jakarta EE was allowed to have a challenge in the hackathon. Among the 150 students in various stages of their education, eight teams of up to four members chose to take on our challenge. At the time of writing this post, we hadn’t yet selected the winner among them. Directly after the closing of ShiftAPPens, I will continue to England to give a guest lecture at the University of York.

An interesting thing that came out of Open Community eXperience last week is this analyst report about Jakarta EE from ECI. It is a good writeup that highlights that Jakarta EE is built for longevity rather than being first on the hype curve. The article also points out that vendor-neutral integration standards will become increasingly valuable in the enterprise market.

For Jakarta EE 12, Milestone 4 is approaching. The Jakarta EE Platform project expects to see deliverables from the following individual specifications for this milestone:

• REST 5.0 M1 API / spec
• CDI 5.0 Milestone / Beta (currently at Alpha4)
• JSON-P 2.2 M1 API / spec
• JSON-B 3.1 M1 API / spec

Check out the Jakarta EE 12 planning board for the current status.

Next weekend, I will be speaking at JavaConnect KE 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya. This will be a brand new talk about how to augment LLMS with various agentic techniques using Jakarta EE as the foundation. This will be my first visit to Kenya, so I am really looking forward to connect with the local Java community there.

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

This week, I was at Open Community eXperience (OCX) in Brussels. I will publish a post about it shortly. This year, OCX unfortunately conflicted with JCON Europe in Cologne. This was kind of a bummer for me, but these things happen in the busy conference season. Next year, at least these two conferences won’t conflict. The dates for OCX 2027 are April 13-15, while JCON Europe 2027 will be May 31-June 3.

Eclipse Foundation is rolling out GitHub CoPilot Enterprise to all committers and I was so lucky to be in the first batch. It will enable us to automate some of the tasks associated with the JESP (Jakarta EE Specification Process). I set up instructions for CoPilot in the template for Compatibility Requests, so we can use an agent to validate the requests. One of the checklist items for that is to validate that the SHA-256 sums of the TCKs listed match. Definietely something a machine is more capable of getting right than a human. Of course, the actual approval of the request will still need a human in the loop to verify that everything is correct.

When I started the Hasthag Jakarta EE series, one of my goals was to include articles and posts about or adjacent to Jakarta EE to help amplify the good work done in our community. I do it from time to time, but I also want to do more, so please send me a link to an article if you want it mentioned here. For example, this article by Rustam about API versioning in Java using JAX-RS with Jakarta EE and MicroProfile is an excellent read that I higly recommend that you take a look at.

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

The upcoming week, I will be in Brussels for Open Community eXperience 2026. My talk, titled The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java – with Jakarta EE is scheduled for Wednesday. When I am not attending other talks or roaming the hallway, I can be found staffing the Eclipse Foundation booth in the exhibition area. I hope to see you there!

The release of Jakarta EE 12 consists of multiple Milestones that are continuously being refined to reflect the current status. In the Platform call last week, the platform project set up expectations for a couple of the milestones. First out is Milestone 4, in which the specifications that are part of Jakarta EE Core Profile are expected to show progress in the form of milestone or beta-releases.

M4 Apr 1 to May 15
– REST 5.0 M1 API / spec
– CDI 5.0 Milestone / Beta (currently at Alpha4)
– JSON-P 2.2 M1 API / spec
– JSON-B 3.1 M1 API / spec
M5 May 16 to Jun 30
– content to be defined
M6 Jul 1 to Aug 15
– content to be defined
M7 Aug 15 to Sep 30
– Ideally, we release Core profile here or soon after
M8 Oct 1 to Nov 15
– content to be defined
M9 Jan 1 to Feb 15, 2027
– Finalize all other specifications
M10 Feb 16 to Mar 31, 2027
– Release Platform TCK with ratifying impl

The Platform Project will continue to refine this timeline by adding expectations to each milestone. Note that even if a specification is not listed for a specific milestone, nothing prevents it from publishing ahead of time. If the current plan holds, we should be able to release Jakarta EE Core Profile in Q4, 2026, while Jakarta EE Web Profile and Jakarta EE Platform will be released in Q1 or Q2 next year. This follows the same pattern as for Jakarta EE 11.

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

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates! Right before the Easter holiday, I went to Amsterdam for Voxxed Days Amsterdam 2026. This was the second year this conference was organized, and they had almost 1000 registered attendees. Could this be the next Devoxx? It should certainly be a candidate. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Devoxx Amsterdam next year.

I also attended the Jakarta EE Platform call, which was pretty good this week. Well attended and lots of good discussions. Among other things, we talked about how the three security specifications relate to each other. For historic reasons, Jakarta Authorization is not a part of Jakarta EE Web Profile, while both Jakarta Authentication and Jakarta Security are. There has been talk about merging the security specifications into one Jakarta Security at some point. The first step would be to include Authorization in Web Profile. This is certainly something we can do for Jakarta EE 12.

Since I am enjoying a couple of extra days at home over Easter (the first time I am home more than two consecutive days since January), I decided to do some cleaning up of the online resources for Javaforum Malmö. I have been in the fortunate situation of having Foo Café as a venue for the Java User Group over the last 10 years. I would provide the speaker and agenda, and Foo Café would handle everything else. Promotion, registration, catering, and sponsors. Our February event was one of the last at Foo Café before they closed down, so now I have to think differently. I created a simple website to gather our contact points and set up an Eventbrite account to use for registration to our events.

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

Next week I will be having a booth at Voxxed Amsterdam since Jakarta EE was offered a space in the Community Square as one of the ambassadors of the conference. I hope to meet as many as possible of you there! If the swag gods are with me, I will be able to bring some nice stuff. There will be stickers, for sure.

The next conference I am speaking at will be Open Community eXperience 2026. This conference is located in Brussels, Belgium from April 21 to April 23. I will be presenting The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java on Wednesday, April 22.

Due to my fairly intensive traveling the last couple of months, I have not been able to attend as many Jakarta EE Platform calls as I would have wanted. But from what I can se from the minutes, Jakarta EE 12 is slowly moving forward. There are a couple of specifications publishing milestone releasees. Among them Jakarta Faces 5.0, Jakarta NoSQL 1.1, as well as Jakarta JSON Binding 3.1.