Eclipse Foundation

Hashtag Jakarta EE #13

Welcome to the thirteenth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

EclipseCon 2020 is added to the long list of events that transforms into a virtual event this year. For those with an eye for detail will notice that the conference has changed the name from EclipseCon Europe to simply EclipseCon.

The name change has nothing to do with the decision to go virtual this year. EclipseCon is a global event and has been so for years, so removing the Europe part of the name just makes sense.

The seemingly never-ending story of creating a working group for Eclipse MicroProfile took an interesting turn at the end of this week. In an email to the Microprofile mailing list, Mike Milinkovich tasked the MicroProfile community to come up with a proposal for a MicroProfile Working Group Charter. This means that the efforts of creating a common working group or an Umbrella working group structure in relation to Jakarta EE have been put on hold.

I think it is a good thing that the discussions now can be around how to get the MicroProfile Working Group up and running so we can all focus our energy on technical challenges rather than governance.

Navigating jakarta.ee

A new Studio Jakarta EE recording is available!

In this snippet, I go through the new navigation elements added to the specifications part of the Jakarta EE website. Specifically, links to the Eclipse Project pages and an external webpage if that exists.

A trivia at the end. Which year did we get the shirt I am wearing in the video at JavaOne? Tweet me the reply if you remember it. A photo of yourself in the same shirt is a bonus! No prices other than fame and glory 🙂

Studio Jakarta EE

As I wrote in my latest #Hashtag Jakarta EE. I just started a new YouTube channel called Studio Jakarta EE. Since I totally forgot to introduce myself in the first video, I uploaded a new one today to correct that. This short video also features Duke as my distinguished guest.

I hope you enjoy this effort as it is a completely new experience for me. These first recordings are probably not up for any Academy Awards yet…

But if you bear with me and my silly stuff now in the beginning as I walk my first steps as Youtuber, my promise to You is that the videos will be better and maybe even contain some relevant information in the near future. Stay tuned!

Hashtag Jakarta EE #12

Welcome to the twelfth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I should have been speaking at JavaLand, one of my favorite conferences.

But as you are aware of, this conference was added to the long list of cancelled events this spring.

Being a Developer Advocate normally involves a lot of travel and interacting with people face-to-face. Now that we’re all grounded in one way or the other, I have been exploring the various options for creating video content, either by live-streaming or prerecorded sessions. It is a jungle! The rest of this post describes some of the efforts we have started up this week.

I am super happy with the free Crowdcast channel for JUGs that we were able to set up with funding from Jakarta EE. Make sure to add it to your bookmarks and follow the channel for updates on upcoming events.

This morning I created the Studio Jakarta EE YouTube channel and uploaded the first video, so I can now officially call my self a Youtuber 🙂

At the Eclipse Foundation, we will also start streaming a series of interviews, discussions and live events on the Eclipse Foundation Crowdcast channel.

If you are still hungry for more, take look at the recordings from last year’s Jakarta One LiveStream.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #11

Welcome to the eleventh issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

It’s been a special week. But at least, in our industry, we are pretty well equipped and used to remote working. Let’s just cross our fingers and hope that the measures taken will get the situation under control and we can get back to normal as soon as possible.

Supporting the Community

At the end of the week, we launched an initiative sponsored by the Jakarta EE Working Group to enable Java User Groups around the world to stream live events for free using our Crowdcast account. This will be available for at least as long as physical meetups are put on hold due to the Covid-19 situation.

Over to some updates about what is going on in the MicroProfile community.

Push vs Pull

The hangout this Tuesday was in entirety devoted to discussing the Pull vs Push approach for technical alignment with other standardization bodies, such as Jakarta EE. The vote is ongoing and will be closed Tuesday, March 17. Check out the MicroProfile Calendar for details about how to join the MicroProfile hangouts.

The current status of the voting indicates that the decision will be to go for a Pull model. What will this mean for Jakarta EE?

Implications of Pull

The obvious consequence of the Pull model is that if Jakarta EE decides to pull in a MicroProfile specification, it will essentially mean a fork. For those runtimes supporting either MicroProfile or Jakarta EE, but not both, it will be business as usual.

Those supporting both will have the headache of figuring out how to implement this. This will probably not be a hard nut to crack until one, or two of the tines of the fork, start evolving.

A possible Scenario

Let’s say that Jakarta EE decides to pull in MicroProfile Config and create a specification called Jakarta Config. The base package is changed from org.eclipse.microprofile.config to jakarta.config and the specification is added to the Jakarta EE Full and/or Web Profile.

Other Jakarta specifications are now free to reference Jakarta Config and implementations are required to implement it in order to be Jakarta EE Compatible. Products out there supporting both (e.g. OpenLiberty, WildFly, and Payara to mention a few open-source implementations), will now have two configuration options that are more or less identical.

Let’s say, then, that Jakarta Config adds a nifty feature. Should this feature be back-ported to MicroProfile Config? Or should MicroProfile Config be abandoned and Jakarta Config added to the base Jakarta specs required for MicroProfile?

I think these questions need to be addressed somehow, and that it is up to the vendors behind these initiatives to figure out a strategy that is in the best interest of their customers. It is a too easy way out to say that this will self-regulate by the community.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #8

Welcome to the eigth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I was at Devnexus in Atlanta. This awesome conference organized by the Atlanta Java User Group has established itself as the place to be if you are a Java developer. This year with 2400 attendees and an amazing line-up of world-class speakers.

On the evening the first day of the conference, the Eclipse Foundation hosted a Cloud Native for Java Meetup. More than 100 participants came together for food, drinks and technical discussions around Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile.

My talk What’s Going on with Jakarta EE was well received by those who attended. I gave an update on Jakarta EE 9 as well as outlining many of the various ways of getting involved.

The Jakarta EE booth was located in the community corner of the exhibition hall together with Apache, OSI, and AdoptOpenJDK. We had a great time there with lots of good discussions.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #6

Welcome to the sixth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

On the fun side, I was made aware that my shoutout for the Hashtag series may be a little confusing as you can see in my conversation with Ronnie Zolverda.

I didn’t want to use #5 to indicate number 5 since Twitter would then interpret the hashtag (#) as if I were tagging the number 5. Also interesting that nobody reacted on the first 4 posts…

From this week on, I will tweet that “Hashtag Jakarta EE number X is out!” to avoid confusion in the future 🙂

So, over to the technical side. Gunnar Morling referred me to a recent article of his where he describes how to use the JDK Flight Recorder to monitor REST APIs.

We didn’t have any Jakarta Tech Talks or Update calls this week, but the work with Jakarta EE 9 proceeds as planned. The status is best followed by checking out the project board. We have now passed the deadline for individual component release plans. These are Java Activation Framework 2.0 and Jakarta Enterprise Beans 4.0. The rest will follow the release plan for the full platform.

The discussions regarding establishing a working group for MicroProfile, mentioned in Hashtag Jakarta EE #1 and #3, continue with weekly MicroProfile hangouts as well as being a recurring topic in the Jakarta EE Steering Committee.

So far, there are two proposals on the table; a joint working group or two separate working groups. While the structure of the working group(s) is important, another aspect is the technical alignment of Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. A couple of weeks ago David Belvins put forward a couple of proposals to bootstrap the discussions. A third proposal was presented by Steve Millidge where he proposes that profiles in Jakarta EE are promoted to individual brands and that MicroProfile becomes a profile of Jakarta EE. Interesting thoughts!

Hashtag Jakarta EE #5

Welcome to the fifth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This weekend, I attended my first FOSDEM. This is a free event that takes place in Brussels every year. It is quite an experience with fully packed rooms and crowded corridors. Sessions are short (25 mins) and focused. Absolutely a recommendation!

Mike Milinkovich presented Free at Last! The Tale of Jakarta EE for a full Java Dev Room.

Check out the minutes from the weekly Jakarta EE Platform call to follow the progress of Jakarta EE 9.

Earlier this week, I presented Microservices in Practice with Eclipse MicroProfile at Javaforum Malmö.

This demo-heavy talk was well received. There has been a steady increase of participants in our JUG over the last year, a strong indication for the continued popularity of Java.

If you have made it this far, I want to end this hashtag with an encouragement to check out these articles by Nicolas Frankel. He provides some very useful tips and advice about Tricky Servlet Mappings and Creative use of Filters.

Contributing to Jakarta EE

This post is meant to clear up some misunderstandings that occurred during a discussion thread on the Jakarta EE Community mailing list. Some of this is a repetition of what I described in Jakarta EE 9 Shaping Up in December, but such an important topic cannot be stressed enough.

The only thing you need in order to contribute to Jakarta EE specifications is a signed ECA!

First of all, to contribute to any open source project at the Eclipse Foundation, you will need to create an account and sign the Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA). See below for a visualization of this process.

Steps to create an Eclipse Account

That’s it!

You can now start contributing by submitting Pull Requests to the projects you are interested in, including Jakarta EE specification projects. It doesn’t cost anything. No signatures from your employer are necessary. Just the ECA. The only thing you need in order to contribute to Jakarta EE specifications is a signed ECA!

The more you contribute, the more likely it is that you will be proposed to become a committer to the project. I will describe the zero-cost way of becoming a committer in a follow-up post to this one.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #4

Welcome to the fourth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

We’re on a roll here! I can’t believe it is already four weeks since I started this series!

Stay tuned for announcements about Jakarta MVC!

A little on the side of Jakarta EE, but still related is that the MVC 1.0 specification (JSR 371) is finally final! We have been working with this for a long time, and special thanks to Christian for his work in getting the release out the door! Without him, I doubt there would be a release of MVC!

So, why isn’t MVC already moved over to the Eclipse Foundation and Jakarta EE? The short answer to that is that we wanted to finish the first release under the JCP in order to have a released project to transfer. We have already transferred Krazo, the reference implementation and the plan is to start the transfer of the specification and the TCK shortly. Stay tuned for announcements about Jakarta MVC!

Jakarta EE 9 is moving forward with great progress. The status of all the work is tracked on the Jakarta EE 9 tracking board. If you are involved in one of the specifications in the Plan Review column, you are encouraged to take a look and see how you can help move these specifications forward to the In Progress column. Instructions can be found in notes at the top of the columns.