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IntelliJ IDEA Conf 2026

IntelliJ IDEA Conf is a virtual conference where the speakers and hosts are gathered in the same location. The 2026 edition was supposed to be in Cyprus in March, but due to the World situation, it was relocated to Amsterdam in September.

My talk was The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. It was hosted by Anton, who has a long history with enterprise Java from various communities and companies, so we were able to have a good dialogue during the talk, with some anecdotes from the past.

Don’t despair if you missed it. The entire conference is available to watch for free on YouTube, so you can watch my talk as well as all the other talks there anytime you want.

It is an interesting concept for a virtual conference. The studio setup with a host makes it feel more like a conversation than doing a recording in your home office. Hence, it gives a much more dynamic feel to the talk. Since all speakers were gathered there, we had the opportunity to network and chat with each other during the whole two days. The IntelliJ IDEA team from JetBrains also ran a couple of sessions about various topics that we could attend.

Between the sessions, they had a photographer take our speaker portraits. The “fold-your-arms” pose is usually a favorite among portrait photographers, so I have done a few over the years. Here is a side-by-side with the photo taken this week in Amsterdam and one taken ten years ago in Malmö. Ten years later. Same pose. A little more gray hair and a new T-shirt.

JavaZone 2026

This was my first JavaZone as an exhibitor. I didn’t have a talk this year, so I spent the time on the exhibition floor at the Jakarta EE booth with Shabnam and Tanja. Arjan from OmniFish was also there, helping out with the booth. We had a steady stream of attendees, speakers, exhibitors, and organizers stopping by, which resulted in lots of good conversations about anything related to tech and/or Jakarta EE.

I usually hang out on the exhibition floor between talks when I am at conferences. When we have a booth, even more so. In addition to hanging out at the booth, I attended a couple of talks as well. A special feature of JavaZone is that there is no allocated time slot for lunch. Food is served throughout the day in the exhibition area. I wonder this concept isn’t adopted by more conferences. It generates a stead stream of people to an around the exhibitors. And the long lines at lunch is avoided.

Due to the passing of the King of Norway just a couple of days before the conference, the mood in Oslo was naturally a little subdued. On the other hand, there were more people out and about than there usually is. The conference wasn’t affected by this at all, at least nothing I could notice.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #349

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

The Jakarta EE ecosystem is growing. Last week, Vidocq filed a Compatibility Certification Request for Jakarta EE 11 Core Profile. This is excellent news! We welcome all new implementations of Jakarta EE with open arms.

The release review of Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) 5.0 is ongoing and will be completed next week. That means that the first specification update for Jakarta EE 12 is released.

The Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence project has released a Milestone of the specification. Check out their website to learn more about the specification. The specification is implemented by Azul Payara Community 2026.8. This blog post on foojay describes how to get started with it.

The Call for Papers for JakartaOne Livestream 2026 is still open, so submit your talk today to have a chance of being a part of the program.

Stay tuned for a post about my trip to Norway and JavaZone 2026.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #348

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

This week, I will be going to Oslo and JavaZone 2026. I will be there with Tanja and Shabnam to staff the Jakarta EE booth. It is the first time we are sponsoring this event, so it will be a new experience seeing it from this side after being a speaker there multiple times in the past. We will also have several members from our community helping out with the booth. Make sure to stop by for a chat or pick up some swag.

After a relaxing August, I am now ready for the upcoming conference season. I have lots of talks planned at conferences and Java User Groups all over the World. Check out my Jakarta EE Developer Advocate page for the complete list. It is continuously updated.

Jakarta Contexts and Dependency Injection 5.0 is currently being reviewed by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. This is the first of the specifications that are being updated for Jakarta EE 12, so it is quite a milestone for Jakarta EE 12. The plan is to release Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile by the beginning of December for it to be properly celebrated at JakartaOne Livestream on December 1. The Call for Papers is still open, so submit your talk today to have a chance of being a part of the program.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #347

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

In my post from JakartaOne Dominican Republic 2026, I highlighted the Coffee Builder plugin created by Diego Silva Limaco. It is an awesome project to make the everyday life of a Jakarta EE developer easier. Guess what? Great news! Diego just created a project proposal for the Eclipse Coffee Builder for Jakarta EE. It is currently under Community Review, as defined by the Eclipse Foundation Development Process. I urge you to check out this cool project, try it out, provide feedback, and even better, contribute back.

The goal of releasing Jakarta EE 12 Core Profile in time for JakartaOne Livestream 2026 seems to be on track. In parallel with this, the Jakarta EE Platform project is starting to pay closer attention to the specifications of the Web Profile and the Platform itself. Their release target is in the first half of next year.

Speaking of JakartaOne Livestream. We are still eager to receive your talk proposals. The CFP is open for a couple of more weeks, so there is still time. But, as always, submit early and often is a better strategy to increase your chances of getting a talk accepted. The program committee is particularly interested in talks about how you leverage AI in your enterprise applications. Which tools are you using for integration, how are you using them, pitfalls, and recommendations. Talks about tooling for Jakarta EE are also interesting.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #346

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

My next conference will be JavaZone in Lillestrøm, right north of Oslo. Jakarta EE is sponsoring, so you will find me in our booth on the exhibition floor. I would love to chat with you, so please come by between sessions.

The specifications that are targeting Jakarta EE 12 are continuously producing milestones. As I mentioned last week, Jakarta CDI 5.0 is up for release review. Jakarta JSON Binding 3.1 has had an M1 out for a while, and an M2 is shaping up. Jakarta JSON Processing 2.2 is planning for an M1 shortly. For Jakarta RESTful Web Services 5.0, the team is waiting for the three required +1s to get the pull requests merged before they are able to produce an M1. If you are a committer on this specification project, please review PR #1340.

“I chose Jakarta EE 11 for my demo because I was the lead release coordinator for that release. I believe in open standards as the best way to empower developers.”

Ed Burns, Microsoft

Ed Burns, the release lead of Jakarta EE 11, has published an article titled Using the GitHub Copilot SDK for Java in which he extensively uses Jakarta EE 11 to build an AI agent harness. It is an excellent example of how a robust and stable technology like Jakarta EE can be leveraged to build agent capabilities into enterprise applications.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #345

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

Last week, I attended JCrete 2026. You can read all about it in my post from the event. My next event will be JavaZone in the beginning of September, where Jakarta EE will be present on the exhibition floor with a booth.

The first specification targeting Jakarta EE 12 that has filed for a release review is Jakarta CDI 5.0. Congratulations to the project for getting a release ready. Thank you for the great work! Getting the first specification through it’s release review and following release is a great moment for every major Jakarta EE release. Good to know that we are on track!

The Jakarta Agentic Artificial Intelligence specification produced its first Milestone release a couple of weeks ago. This week, they published their refreshed project web page. The page contains a lot of good information about the specification and how it is intended to help build AI agents with Jakarta EE. Check it out and give feedback to the team.

JCrete 2026

JCrete 2026 was just as good as the previous ones that I have attended, and that has been quite a few. I think my first time was in 2016 or maybe in 2015, but I am not entirely sure. It is a yearly tradition for me now to go to JCrete during summer.

For those that don’t know, JCrete is an unConference. That means that nobody is a speaker, and everybody is a speaker. The program is made up the program as we go, so you never know which themes that will be discussed. The only thing you know is that whatever happens is the right thing, and whatever outcome is the right one.

In addition to the sessions, which are limited to four half-days, there are excursions to nearby beaches, morning runs, walks, bike rides, hiking and diving. Something for everyone’s taste. And if there is something you want to do, it is just to propose it and see if anyone else are interested as well.

And then there is the food…OMG…the food. The lunches at the OAC are worth the trip alone. In the evenings we split up and visit different restaurants and tavernas in the area. One of the nights, there is a Cretan evening with local food and local dansers performing. And on Thursday, we had the traditional JCrete barbeque. Only this year, we couldn’t light the grills due to the extreme dry conditions and fire and fire risk. So the solutions became an old Cretan tradition of using the local bakery oven to prepare the meat and grilled vegetables.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #344

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

This will be a rather short post since it is in the time of the year most people are on vacation or doing something else than reading blogs. This week, I have attended JCrete with lots of regulars and also made friends among the new faces. I will write a more detailed writeup from JCrete later.

The Starter for Jakarta EE has just released a new version with support for Jakarta EE 11. You can use the starter to quickly get started by generating a new Jakarta EE project. You can choose to create a plain project with no runtime configuration, or you can choose to get your project fully configured for one of the implementations of Jakarta EE 11. You can also get the Dockerfile generated for you. Please give it a try and tell us what you think.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #343

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

I have been home a week since JConf Dominicana 2026, and today I am setting course for Crete to be a part of JCrete 2026. This unconference in the Mediterranean in the middle of summer has become a tradition for me since I first attended more than ten years ago.

Even if the summer holidays are upon us, the Jakarta EE Platform project continues to meet every Tuesday in the Platform call. There is a bit of progress in the Jakarta RESTful Web Services project now, so it seems like they will be able to publish a milestone soon with the changes needed to deprecate and eventually remove the custom component model in favor of CDI. A final release will be available for Jakarta EE 12.

The limits that were recently introcuced for publication to Maven Central is stirring up the open source community. There are discussions among the Java Champions for how to cope with this. A suggestion that a vendor-neutral model like the one for Open VSX may be a possible way forward should it continue to be a problem. Good to know is that projects hosted at Eclipse Foundation currently have no limitations for publishing artifacts to Maven Central.

A little over a week ago, the Java Documentary by CultRepo titled The Java Story was released. You should really watch it to get a glimpse of this amazing community and ecosystem around Java. I am also pleased to be featured in the documentary. Not a big part, but I am there representing the community, Jakarta EE, Eclipse Foundation, Enterprise Java, and open source in general.