Hashtag JakartaEE

Hashtag Jakarta EE #328

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

In just about a week, Open Community eXperience is happening in Brussels, Belgium. The four days between April 21 and April 23 are packed with talks from amazing speakers delivering keynotes, regular talks, workshops, and BOFs. In addition to all the scheduled content, we have the hallway track. This is where it happens. Spontaneous conversations about all kinds of topics just appear out of nowhere. The hallway track is by far the most valuable aspect of attending conferences.

My talk titled The Past, Preseent, 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.

In the Jakarta EE Platform call this week, we discussed what that would be needed for Jakarta NoSQL to be included as one of the specifications in Jakarta EE 12. There is still some reluctance among some of our members to include this specification, so please make your voice heard if you want to see Jakarta NoSQL in Jakarta EE 12. If you have some extra time on your hand, you can also step in and help the project address the issues that the platform project has requested to strenghen its position as a candidate for inclusion.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #327

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.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #326

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.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #325

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

I am on my way home from JavaOne 2026 with a bag full of swag and a head full of inspiration and new ideas. One of the ideas has already resulted in a brand new abstract that I have submitted to a couple of upcoming conferences. Let’s hope the program committees are as excited as I am about it. If accepted, I think the conference attendees choosing to listen to my talk are up for a treat.

Jakarta EE 12 Milestone 3 is coming up. There is some activity in various specification projects, which is good. Others, on the other hand, could benefit from a little wakening call. There was a welcoming update from Jakarta RESTful Web Services in the platform call this week. It seems like they are making some progress in the CDI replacement of @Context.

You may be using skills to augment your AI Agents in some way or the other. SkillsJars offer a simple solution to publish skills as JAR-files on Maven Central. It is a pretty cool project created by James Ward. I recommend taking a look at it. It may simplify your workflow significantly if you are moving a lot of skills around by copy-paste on the file system. With SkillsJars, you simply add them as dependencies to your project.

A cool thing that was announced at JavaOne this year was the reopening of Project Detroit. The purpose of this project is to bring JavaScript and Python to the JVM. The project was brought to life as a result of the Foreign Function & Memory API from Project Panama.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #324

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

Last week, I was at JavaLand 2026. 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.

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.

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.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #320

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

Ooops, I amn an little late publishing Hashtag Jakarta EE number 320. I am currently on my way home from Johannesburg and a successful JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG. I will write more about the event in a separate post next week. Speaking of next week, Immediately after returning from South Africa, I will head to San Jose, California for DeveloperWeek.

Since I have been busy traveling, I don’t have much update regarding what’s going on with Jakarta EE 12, but according to the minutes of the call this week, the estimated release date looks like it will be pushed out to Q4 this year. Delivering it in 2026 is the important aspect, not necessarily the month. This gives the platform team and the indivicual specifications a little more time to get their work don.

Registration for Open Community eXperience in Brussels, April 21-23 is open. I have a 20% discount code, so DM me if you are interested in attending this conference.