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

We are currently entering the release review stage of Jakarta EE 11. Since we are releasing no less than four milestones of this release, the individual component specifications will be reviewed and released in stages. This is different from previous releases, where the Specification Committee reviewed all specifications in a big chunk. You can check out the progress of the reviews by checking out the pull requests labeled release review in the Specifications GitHub repository.

I have a lot of events coming up in the following months. You can get the full overview at the Developer Advocate pages on the Jakarta EE website. I update the list continuously as responses from CFPs I have submitted abstracts to are sent out.

I appreciate absolutely all conferences I am found worthy of speaking at and I give them all as much buzz as possible in social media and blog posts before, during, and after the event. One of the conferences I am speaking at this year is Spring I/O. I have heard only good things about this conference, and look very much forward to my first appearance as a speaker there with a talk titled Why Spring Matters to Jakarta EE – and Vice Versa.

I guess iris time for me to mention @rodrigograciano in my next Hashtag @JakartaEE to get mentioned…stay tuned for next week 😀 https://t.co/ioKEteJChU

— Ivar Grimstad (@ivar_grimstad) February 25, 2024

Here is my follow-up to my post on X last week. I recommend that everyone check out Rodrigo’s Weekend Reading List to keep up-to-date on things going on in the Java Community.

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

I am now on my way home after a week in North America where I spoke at Philly JUG and ConFoo, my second tour overseas this year. The upcoming month will be dedicated to Europe. First up is Malmö JUG on February 29. Then I will go to Hasselt in Belgium for the Belgian JUG on March 19 (event to be announced), and finally Voxxed Days Bucharest from March 27 to March 29.

Milestone 2 of Jakarta EE 11 is coming up shortly. The plan is to have it released at the beginning of March after the release reviews of the component specifications included are started. Check out the Jakarta EE 11 Release Plan for details.

While waiting for Jakarta EE 11, why not test out your skills with Jakarta EE 10 and participate in the second edition of the Payara Hackathon? If an opportunity to play with cool technology isn’t motivation enough, then look at the prices. You can win up to £3000. Yes, you got that right! 3000 British Pounds!

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

I’m back from my vacation and I am ready to roll again. This week, I will cross the pond to speak at PhillyJUG on Tuesday before continuing to Montreal and ConFoo 2024 for the remainder of the week.

As I mentioned last week, the Jakarta EE Platform project plans to deliver four milestones of Jakarta EE before the final release. Milestone 2 planned for March 2024 is fast approaching and the individual component specifications that are expected to be a part of this milestone are scrambling together the final bits and pieces to be ready for their releases.

Since I have been more or less off the grid the last week, I don’t have much more this week. Take a look at the minutes from the weekly Jakarta EE Platform call to stay up-to-date on the discussions going on.

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

This week I started with a trip to Jfokus 2024 in Stockholm. Directly after that, I began a week of vacation, meaning I am diving in the Red Sea while you are reading this.

The Jakarta EE Platform project will use milestones as a part of the release plan for Jakarta EE 11. The planned milestones for Jakarta EE 11 are:
– Milestone 1: December, 2023
– Milestone 2: March, 2024
– Milestone 3: April, 2024
– Milestone 4: May, 2024

The goal is that some of the component specifications will be ready for release review for each milestone. Which component specifications that are expected in each milestone are specified in the Jakarta EE 11 release plan. After the last milestone, there should only be the Jakarta EE Platform, Jakarta EE Web Profile, and Jakarta EE Core Profile specifications left.

It is the first time we are using Milestones for a Jakarta EE release. Hopefully, it will turn out to be a good idea that will help us complete the release as planned in June/July this year.

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

I arrived back home from my January JUG Tour with visits to the JCP 25-Year Anniversary Party, Nashville JUG, Seattle JUG, and Portland JUG yesterday. But no rest for the brave. Already tomorrow, I am traveling to Stockholm for Jfokus 2024.

My talk is scheduled for Tuesday at 16:00 and is titled Prepare for Jakarta EE 11 with the subtitle Performance and Developer Productivity. In this talk, I give an update on what to expect from Jakarta EE 11 with demos of some of the features that are ready, or near to ready.

Talking about Jakarta EE 11, the Jakarta EE Platform project has decided to support Java SE 17 in addition to Java SE 21. This will allow for more adoption, especially for the compatible implementations of the individual component specifications. At the same time, vendors that have started working on their implementation based on Java SE 21 will be able to continue that journey. There is no requirement that they must certify their products on Java SE 17 in addition to Java SE 21.

If you want to learn more about this, come to my talk at Jfokus on Tuesday!

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

This week continued with discussions around Java versions. The latest update is that the Jakarta EE Specification Committee wants to do a Progress Review of the planned Jakarta EE 11 release. This is all according to the Jakarta EE Specification Process (JESP), so there is really no drama about that part. The Jakarta EE Platform Project will present its plan, and the Specification Committee will vote to approve it. While this is happening, the work with the release will progress as planned.

However, there is a potential bump in the road if the ballot does not pass. This will force the Platform Project to come up with a revision of the plan (a Plan C if you will) that will satisfy the Specification Committee. The outcome of that plan may, or may not, impact the release date of Jakarta EE 11.

While the focus is currently on the next version of Jakarta EE, there is also a need to look ahead to what will happen beyond Jakarta EE 11. To accommodate this, the Jakarta EE Working Group has put together a document to brainstorm this topic. Please take a look at it and provide input. The topic that attracts my immediate attention is a potential Jakarta AI Specification, something I also mentioned in Hashtag Jakarta EE #309 on December 31 last year.

I am currently in Nashville preparing for my first JUG Meetup of the year on Monday. I hope you will be able to come to Nashville JUG on Monday, January 29 at 6:00 PM if you are in the neighborhood.

While waiting for that, check out my blog post from the JCP 25-year Anniversary Celebration.

JCP 25-year Anniversary Celebration

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

As I mentioned in last week’s Hashtag Jakarta EE, there has been a change to the targeted Java version for Jakarta EE 11. In addition to supporting Java 21, the Jakarta EE Platform project is also planning to support Java 17 with Jakarta EE 11. While this may seem like a significant change, it turns out that it isn’t that dramatic. None of the component specifications were actually planning on exposing any Java 21 features in their APIs. The only one close to it was Jakarta Concurrency 3.1, with the planned support for Java Virtual Threads. But it turns out that careful API design allows for support if the underlying JVM supports it.

The biggest change is for the Test Compatibility Kit (TCK), which must be able to run on both Java 17 and Java 21. The implementations that had moved their code base to Java 21 are also affected to some degree depending on how far they have gotten and how many Java 17+ features they have started using.

To accommodate for the extra work involved, the Jakarta EE Project has adjusted the dates for milestones in the release plan. The goal of delivering Jakarta EE 11 in June/July 2024 still stands.

It’s been more than a month since I was at the airport. But that is about to change in a couple of days. I will participate in the 25th Anniversary celebration of the Java Community Process (JCP) in Mountain View on Thursday, January 25. After that, I will speak at three Java User Groups in three days. First up is Nashville JUG on Monday, January 29 followed by Seattle JUG on Tuesday, January 30, and Portland JUG on Wednesday, January 31. In addition to talking, The JCP anniversary will be properly celebrated in all the JUGs. Heather VanCura will join me in Seattle and Portland.

Jan 25: JCP 25-year Anniversary Celebration
Jan 29: Nashville JUG
Jan 30: Seattle JUG
Jan 31: Portland JUG (event soon to be published)

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

January is usually not a very busy month regarding conferences and events, and 2024 is no exception so far. It is not until the end of the month that I have something planned. But from there, the pace picks up significantly. I am going on a short trip to the US where I will participate in the celebration of 25 years of the Java Community Process (JCP). While there, I will also speak at several Java User Groups. So far, my schedule looks like this:

Jan 25: JCP 25-year Anniversary Celebration
Jan 29: Nashville JUG
Jan 30: Seattle JUG (soon to be published)
Jan 31: Portland JUG (planning in progress)
Feb 1: available

I am trying to get in touch with the San Diego JUG for an event on February 1, but without success so far. Please reach out to me If you are involved in this JUG, or another one within a couple of hours’ flight distance from the West Coast and able to host a meetup.

The major discussion within the Jakarta EE Platform project this week has been around Java SE versions. After the Jakarta EE Working Group Steering Committee passed a resolution stating the goal to target Java 21 with Jakarta EE 11, this has been the expectation set in the plan for the platform project. It now turns out that some of the vendors want to lower this requirement to Java 17. The discussions following this have been around how to handle this while delivering according to the timeline outlined in the release plan.

The important thing to note here is that even if we made it possible to certify an implementation for Jakarta EE 11 on Java 17, it will still be able to certify an implementation on Java 21. So for end users, the application developers, it would mean that you could use Java 21 features if the implementation selected supports it. I am sure there will be more on this topic in the following days. I will make sure to revisit it in the next Hashtag Jakarta EE. Stay tuned!

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

The first Hashtag Jakarta EE in 2024. Now with an updated featured image. I have used the same image for all the previous 209 posts, so I figured it was time for an update. I hope you like it!

Right before the holidays, we released the Milestone 1 versions of the Jakarta EE 11 APIs. While doing this, Ed and I had to debug the CI job and Maven configuration that publishes the API artifacts to Maven Central. Ed published a nice write-up on Maven debugging techniques used in this process. Read his blog post to learn more.

The weekly Jakarta EE Platform calls will resume on Tuesday, January 9. The call is scheduled for every Tuesday at 11:00 am EST. This is where the discussions around Jakarta EE 11 are happening, so make sure you are a part of it to stay informed. If you’re not able to attend the calls, check out the meeting minutes.

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

On the last day of the year, it is time to look back and forward. Last week, I looked back on conferences and events I participated in during 2023. The plans for 2024 are forming, so make sure you check out my Developer Advocate page on the Jakarta EE website for an updated list.

One thing I am certain will happen in 2024 is the release of Jakarta EE 11. According to the release plan, it should arrive before summer. Follow the mailing lists and announcements to stay up-to-date on the progress.

The ubiquitous topic of 2023 was AI, and you don’t have to be a wizard to predict that this will continue in 2024. Is it time to start thinking of specifying something around this? I would really like to see some efforts around this in Jakarta EE. Could a Jakarta AI specification be a reality?

Another area I hope to see some activity around in 2024 is how to make technologies such as CRaC and InstantOn first-class citizens of Jakarta EE. Maybe some initiative around turning the org.crac API into a Jakarta EE specification? Did anyone say Jakarta CRaC? Faster startup times will still be important in the years to come, so why not?

Last, but not least, the evolution of the existing specifications will continue in 2024 along with the Jakarta EE Platform, Jakarta EE Web Profile, and Jakarta EE Core Profile. Jakarta NoSQL 1.0 is very close to delivering a final release. Jakarta RPC will hopefully start picking up the pace after a rather slow start. Will there be any new profiles, or should we gradually abandon the profiles and move towards another way of grouping specifications?

There are probably lots of other topics that will pop up on the agenda. The only thing certain about these prediction posts is that there will most likely be something coming that nobody could anticipate. And on that note, I wish you all a Happy New Year, and see you in 2024!

Happy New Year!