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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

As I am writing this, I am sitting in my hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa. Me being here is actually as success story. I was supposed to present Jakarta EE at I Code Java on Tuesday and Wednesday. I have spoken at the conference twice before. Once in Cape Town and once here in Johannesburg. But that was back in 2018 and 2019. A couple of weeks ago the speakers got notified that the conference was cancelled. With flights and accommodations already booked, plans made, Phillip, Buhake and I scrambled and created a substitute event. With funds from the Eclipse Foundation concept of Open Community Meetup and the organisation of Jozi-JUG, we created JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG where Phillip and I will be presenting. The event has 136 registered attendees as of today.

It looks like the release of Jakarta EE 12 may be rescheduled to be in Q4 rather than Q1 this year. Most of the vendors are working on their Jakarta EE 11 implementations, and only a couple of specifications are in a good state for Jakarta EE 12. One of them is Jakarta Persistence 4.0 that is already implemented by a alpha release of Hibernate 8.

GlassFish 8.0.0 was released earlier this week, which means that the GlassFish project, lead by the wonderful folks at OmniFish, will be able start focusing on the Jakarta EE 12 implementation.

I also want to remind you about Open Community eXperience 2026 in Brussels on April 21-23. Registration is open. Make sure to secure you spot now, and show up to my talk.

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

As I write this, I am in Brussels for FOSDEM’26. Stay tuned for an update from this conference in a separate post shortly. Fun fact is that I am sitting in exactly the same place in the lobby of the same hotel I stayed at for FOSDEM’19 writing this post as I did for Hashtag Jakarta EE #5. I think that it was in that moment that I realised that this would be a weekly blog series.

After FOSDEM, I am headed directly to Stockholm for Jfokus 2026. Whenever I am at Jfokus, I am hosting the Jfokus 2026 Morning Run, and this year is no exception. There is no need to sign up for it. Just show up outside the venue at 7:15 on Wednesday morning.

From the discussions in the Jakarta EE Platform call the last couple of weeks, it looks like we won’t see a release of Jakarta EE 12 on this side of summer (on the Northern Hemisphere at least). The reason is that since Jakarta EE 11 was delayed by a year, most of the vendors are currently working on their implementations. Which does not leave much resources to work on the Jakarta EE 12 specifications. At the same time, we want to play catch-up with the original plan and direction directive from the Steering Committee of the Jakarta EE Working Group to release a major release of Jakarta EE 12 about six to nine months after an LTS release of Java. So a compromise will be to release Jakarta EE 12 by the end of the 2026. The deliberations are still going on, so stay tuned on more updates.

The registration for Open Community Experience 2026 has opened. I will be presenting The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java at the main stage there.

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

My first Jakarta EE presentation of 2026 was at Valencia JUG this week. This was the second time the JUG met after the restart after the pandemic. I wasn’t the only one presenting, as I was there with a couple of my colleagues at Eclipse Foundation who gave an overview of some of the areas we have projects in as well as how to get involved in open source.

In one of my demos, I used OmniAI. I really like this library for interacting with AI from Jakarta EE applications. Check out Bauke’s blog post about OmniAI.

Every major release of Jakarta EE has been given a theme, or a slogan characteristic for the release. For Jakarta EE 9, the keywords were “Lower Entry Barriers – Platform for Innovation – Easy Migration“, and for Jakarta EE 10, it was “Modernized – Simplified – Lightweight“. Jakarta EE 11 got the slogan “Developer Productivity and Performance“. When we discussed what we should use for the upcoming Jakarta EE 12 release, the choice fell on “Robust and Flexible“. This is something that fits very well with Jakarta EE, regardless of which release we are talking about, but fits very well with Jakarta EE 12 since it is now even more robust than ever, being the fourth major release since the transfer to Eclipse Foundation.

For the third time, I was among the top three percent of the most active speakers on Sessionize. In addition to an indication of me being fairly active in speaking at conferences, it also shows how Sessionize is more and more established as the preferred platform for CFP.

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

The conference speaking season is starting up again. My first talk of the year will be at Valencia JUG where I will present The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. After that, I will be attending FOSDEM in Brussels. These two events conclude my January.

In February, I will be helping out at Jfokus as a stage host before going to Johannesburg to speak at JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG. While I am in South Africa, I am pleased that Bruno Souza will visit Malmö and present at Javaforum Malmö. Then I will speak at DeveloperWeek in San Jose and ConFoo in Montreal.

Use this link for a free OPEN Pass to DevelopeWeek 2026 ($195 value).

The Jakarta EE Platform project is working toward Milestone 2 of Jakarta EE 12. The milestone date is January 27, 2026. Check out the progress here and be sure to check out the minutes from the weekly platform call if you aren’t able to attend.

The videos from JakartaOne Livestream 2025 are published. Check them out at https://jakartaone.jakarta.ee/2025