JDD was one of my first international conferences I spoke at when I started my conference speaker journey. I presented here in 2013 and 2014 before returning this year. This was the 19th edition of JDD, so the conference is definitely among the long running ones. With a little over 600 attendees it is a decently sized event located in beautiful Kraków.
I presented The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java to an enthusiastic crowd. It has proven to be popular presentation over an over again and always triggers good discussions afterwards.
SKILLAB is a project funded by the European Union. It is aiming to map the skills in supply/demand for job seekers in the EU. The project aims to identify gaps in skills between what the market demands and what the potential workforce can offer. The data gathered can be used to support businesses and recruiters when searching for specific skills.
What intrigues me the most with the SKILLAB project is the possibilities it gives for the open source projects and communities. A common challenge for open source projects is to find new contributors and committers. Where can they find new people that potentially could contribute to the project? And the other way around, how can someone interested in starting a path of contributing to open source identify which project to start with?
This is where SKILLAB comes in. Let’s say that someone who is looking for a job or a new role discovers that they lack a certain skill or skill set for the desired role or position. The algorithms of SKILLAB could then suggest possible open source projects that are looking for help that would help the candidate acquire those skills.
This is a win-win situation.
The open source project and community gets a new contributor, and the contributor acquires the skills needed for the desired new position or role by contributing to the project.
This is kind of the opposite of what the Open Source Communities pilot case is about, but at the same time it is the same data used, so one does not exclude the other.
This week I was in Croatia for JavaCro 2025. The conference season isn’t quite over yet. Next week, I will go to Kraków to present Jakarta EE at JDD 2025. Last time I was at JDD was in 2014, so It has been a while since I spoke at this conference.
The ballot for inclusion of Jakarta Query 1.0 in the Jakarta EE Platform and Jakarta EE Web Profile concluded successfully. As a part of Milestone 1 in the Jakarta EE 12 Release Plan, a good portion of specifications published a M1 release of their specification artifact. The Platform team will most likely publish an M1 release of the APIs in near future.
A proposal for a new specification called Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence has been submitted and is now out for public community review. In addition to commenting on the proposal itself, you can also provide input in the EMO tracking issue. The next steps for this specification will be to go through a Creation Review by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. That will be started as soon as the community review is done.
The program for JakartaOne Livestream has been selected and will be published shortly. The 12-hour online event will be on December 2, 2025. Stay tuned for more information the coming weeks.
My first time at JavaCro was a vert pleasant ecperience. I have heard so much about this conference located on an Island off the shore of Croatia. The Island is Sveti Andrija (St. Andrew Island), a 15-minute boat trip from Rovinj.
I had two talks on the first day of the conference. The day started with Tanja‘s talk titled Jakarta EE impact on the Java ecosystem. I was next up with The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. This is a recap of how important Enterprise Java has been, and still is, for Java in general. It is loaded with demoes of some of the new and upcoming features in Jakarta EE.
The island, which is actually two islands connected by a pier, has plenty of opportunities for a dip in the ocean, sights, and trails for walking or running. I took the oportunity for a run around the islands with Daniel Kec on the second day of the conference in the spirit of #runWithJakartaEE.
Last week, I was in Orlando for IBM TechXchange 2025. I went directly to this event from dev2next in Colorado Springs. After almost two weeks in the US, I had one night at home continuing to Rovinj in Croatia for JavaCro 2025. Conference season is here, that’s for sure.
The target date, October 15, for Milestone 1 for Jakarta EE 12 is approaching. The only concern is about not being able to stage properly due to the end-of-life of OSSRH. We haven’t been able to get a drop-in replacement for this functionality yet. The solution may be to use snapshots for this milestone, or release milestones without verifying them in staging first.
The program for JakartaOne Livestream has been selected and will be published shortly. The 12-hour online event will be on December 2, 2025. Stay tuned for more information the coming weeks.
This was my second time speaking at IBM TechXchange. First time was at the inaugural event in 2023 located in Las Vegas with around 2000 attendees. At this year’s event in Orlando, it had grown to around 9000 attendees. New this year was that the Java community track was organised by JCON. We had a room at prime location near the registration area.
I started off the conference with a welcome dinner/social event for the IBM North Region Territory Team at TopGolf where we enjoyed food and testing our golf swing before continuing to the opening of the Sandbox (exhibition area).
Tuesday started with the opening keynote where, among other things, Bob was introduced. I was so lucky to get a private preview license for Bob the week before the conference. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to test him/it/her? (I will refer to Bob as he from now on…) since I was busy with last week’s conference. I did, however, try to use Bob on Tuesday afternoon for creating a demo for my Wednesday morning talk. He did solve the task I gave him, but he didn’t do it the way he wanted. Rather than using a sort of bleeding edge library, he chose to do it the manual way. The AI tools of today are great for doing mundane tasks with technologies that have been around for a while, such as migrating from one version of to another. But they are not necessarily good for creating demos with newer technologies and libraries. So, long story short, I ended up creating the demo myself.
I did the talk, The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java together with Emily Jiang from IBM. Since it was at an IBM event with a co-speaker from IBM, we tuned the talk slightly to include some references to IBM over the last 30 years. Some good old anecdotes about early WebSphere versions and we shared some experiences with tooling such as WebShpere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) and Rational Application Developer (RAD).
There were also time for a couple of afternoon runs in the area even if the humidity were a bit over what I am used to. As expected, the culinary experience of such a big event isn’t something to write home about. But the lunches on the two first days of the conference were very good. A hot buffet of decent quality. That is something you can’t really say about the boxed lunch the last day. I get why conferences do this, but here’s a tip: If you want attendees to stay for the closing session, at least feed them with something decent.
The second edition of dev2next was a fantastic experience. Located in beautiful Colorado Springs and with a speaker lineup other conferences can only dream of, this conference is the place to be. If you only can pick one conference to attend, dev2next should definitely be on your radar.
I did my presentation titled The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java on Thursday morning. It went very well all the way up to the last demo where I discovered that my Open AI credits had been used up. I was a bit surprised, and still don’t really understand how I have consumed it all since I only use it for demos and last time I checked I still had $4.91 left of my initial $5.00. Maybe they have changed their charge model or something. Anyway, I have filled it up with additional $6.00 for my upcoming demos. Apparently, they also changed the minimum amount from $5 to $6. I guess the AI companies have to make money somewhere…
On the Friday after the conference, the speakers that were still here took the Cog Railway up to the summit of Pikes Peak. The summit is 14.115′, which translates to approximately 4300m. During the conference breaks, I was also able to explore the nearby trails for a #runWithJakartaEE.
I am now in Colorado Springs waiting for my flight to Orlando. The dev2next conference was an amazing experience. So many great speakers, talks, and conversations. A blog post from the event is coming up shortly. The next event will be different. IBM TechXchange is significantly bigger and located in Orlando, Florida.
The voting for including Jakarta Query 1.0 in Jakarta EE 12 is underway. So far, all votes has been positive so it seems like it will make it. I think this is a great step forward for Jakarta EE as this specification will define a general query language for Java, very well suitable outside of the context of Jakarta EE.
The first milestone for Jakarta EE 12 is coming up in the middle of October, which is only about a week away. Stay tuned for more information as we move forward with this release.
Come To Code is a fantastic community event organized by a very dedicated Linux User Group in beautiful Pignola in the south of Italy. Despite the remote location, it gathered 180 eager attendees. This alone is an impressive accomplishment. The conference had two parallel tracks, as well as track dedicated to human skills.
I did a talk about how to Advance Your Career with Open Source that was pretty well recieved. I had some great questions in the Q&A and interesting conversations after.
The second day started with a panel on Open Source that Rosaria moderated. She also had a talk later in the afternoon, but unfortunatly I had to leave in order to make it to my flight home. In addition to the conference and community, I also got to experience some of the amazing food the region has to offer. I will definitely do my best to come back to the conference and the region again, both for the community andn content, but also for the food. Just take a look at the pictures below, and you’ll understand what I am saying.
We have published a 2.0.0-SNAPSHOT of the EE4J parent pom that contains the configuration needed for publish artifacts using the Maven Central Publishing Portal. Since we don’t have a proper replacement for the staging functionality we had with OSSRH yet, we need to use snapshots this way for now. Hopefully there will be a replacement shortly, or at least before we start the process of releasing milestones and release candidates for Jakarta EE 12.
The vote for adding Jakarta Query 1.0 to Jakarta EE 12 continued in this week’s platform call. A discussion around implications of testing on Java 25 also happened. The Jakarta EE 12 TCK will be executed with at least Java 21 and Java 25.
