Jakarta EE

Hashtag Jakarta EE #328

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

In just about a week, Open Community eXperience is happening in Brussels, Belgium. The four days between April 21 and April 23 are packed with talks from amazing speakers delivering keynotes, regular talks, workshops, and BOFs. In addition to all the scheduled content, we have the hallway track. This is where it happens. Spontaneous conversations about all kinds of topics just appear out of nowhere. The hallway track is by far the most valuable aspect of attending conferences.

My talk titled The Past, Preseent, and Future of Enterprise Java – with Jakarta EE is scheduled for Wednesday. When I am not attending other talks or roaming the hallway, I can be found staffing the Eclipse Foundation booth in the exhibition area.

In the Jakarta EE Platform call this week, we discussed what that would be needed for Jakarta NoSQL to be included as one of the specifications in Jakarta EE 12. There is still some reluctance among some of our members to include this specification, so please make your voice heard if you want to see Jakarta NoSQL in Jakarta EE 12. If you have some extra time on your hand, you can also step in and help the project address the issues that the platform project has requested to strenghen its position as a candidate for inclusion.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #327

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

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates! Right before the Easter holiday, I went to Amsterdam for Voxxed Days Amsterdam 2026. This was the second year this conference was organized, and they had almost 1000 registered attendees. Could this be the next Devoxx? It should certainly be a candidate. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Devoxx Amsterdam next year.

I also attended the Jakarta EE Platform call, which was pretty good this week. Well attended and lots of good discussions. Among other things, we talked about how the three security specifications relate to each other. For historic reasons, Jakarta Authorization is not a part of Jakarta EE Web Profile, while both Jakarta Authentication and Jakarta Security are. There has been talk about merging the security specifications into one Jakarta Security at some point. The first step would be to include Authorization in Web Profile. This is certainly something we can do for Jakarta EE 12.

Since I am enjoying a couple of extra days at home over Easter (the first time I am home more than two consecutive days since January), I decided to do some cleaning up of the online resources for Javaforum Malmö. I have been in the fortunate situation of having Foo Café as a venue for the Java User Group over the last 10 years. I would provide the speaker and agenda, and Foo Café would handle everything else. Promotion, registration, catering, and sponsors. Our February event was one of the last at Foo Café before they closed down, so now I have to think differently. I created a simple website to gather our contact points and set up an Eventbrite account to use for registration to our events.

Voxxed Days Amsterdam 2026

When Ko offered Jakarta EE a spot in the JUG Square at Voxxed Days Amsterdam 2026 as an Ambassador of the conference, I immediately accepted. With 950 registered attendees and expansion from a one-day to a two-day conference, Voxxed Days Amsterdam is sailing up as one of the biggest and most important conferences in the area. Jakarta EE is proud to support the conference.

I did not have a talk this year, but ended up on the big screen during the Day 2 opening. A photo of Arjan and me talking in the JUG square was used to exemplify the Hallway Track. For those not familiar with the term, the Hallway Track is the informal meetings and discussions that occur in the hallway between the conference rooms. This is an element that you miss out on if you only attend online conferences. In the Hallway Track is where the magic happens. When attendees, speakers, sponsors. volunteers, staff, and organizers meet informally.

I will definitely be back next year, either as a speaker, sponsor, ambassador, or attendee. I’ll even volunteer or join the catering staff if necessary. If Jakarta EE has a booth next year as well, I will make sure that the rollup banner arrives in time for both days. This year, it arrived a day late, so I was only able to use it on Day 2. Not that it mattered much, I had brought all my leftover swag, and none of it came home with me.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #326

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

Next week I will be having a booth at Voxxed Amsterdam since Jakarta EE was offered a space in the Community Square as one of the ambassadors of the conference. I hope to meet as many as possible of you there! If the swag gods are with me, I will be able to bring some nice stuff. There will be stickers, for sure.

The next conference I am speaking at will be Open Community eXperience 2026. This conference is located in Brussels, Belgium from April 21 to April 23. I will be presenting The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java on Wednesday, April 22.

Due to my fairly intensive traveling the last couple of months, I have not been able to attend as many Jakarta EE Platform calls as I would have wanted. But from what I can se from the minutes, Jakarta EE 12 is slowly moving forward. There are a couple of specifications publishing milestone releasees. Among them Jakarta Faces 5.0, Jakarta NoSQL 1.1, as well as Jakarta JSON Binding 3.1.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #325

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

I am on my way home from JavaOne 2026 with a bag full of swag and a head full of inspiration and new ideas. One of the ideas has already resulted in a brand new abstract that I have submitted to a couple of upcoming conferences. Let’s hope the program committees are as excited as I am about it. If accepted, I think the conference attendees choosing to listen to my talk are up for a treat.

Jakarta EE 12 Milestone 3 is coming up. There is some activity in various specification projects, which is good. Others, on the other hand, could benefit from a little wakening call. There was a welcoming update from Jakarta RESTful Web Services in the platform call this week. It seems like they are making some progress in the CDI replacement of @Context.

You may be using skills to augment your AI Agents in some way or the other. SkillsJars offer a simple solution to publish skills as JAR-files on Maven Central. It is a pretty cool project created by James Ward. I recommend taking a look at it. It may simplify your workflow significantly if you are moving a lot of skills around by copy-paste on the file system. With SkillsJars, you simply add them as dependencies to your project.

A cool thing that was announced at JavaOne this year was the reopening of Project Detroit. The purpose of this project is to bring JavaScript and Python to the JVM. The project was brought to life as a result of the Foreign Function & Memory API from Project Panama.

JavaOne 2026

If I should pick one conference that has been instrumental in defining my career, it would be JavaOne. I have attended almost all editions of JavaOne since my first time in 1999 including the years it was branded as CodeOne. First as an attendee, later as a speaker. What makes JavaOne special is the quality of the technical content and of course the Community. JavaOne is the plays to meet the Java Community. JavaOne 2026 was the second JavaOne since the restart back in the Bay Area. It is now a smaller more boutique-like conference far from what it used to be in its hay-days in the beginning of the Millennium.

I didn’t have a regular talk at this year’s JavaOne and my intention was to go there and enjoy as an attendee. But then the opportunity to host a mentoring session in the Mentoring Hub came up. Since I have done mentoring sessions at the Mentoring Hubs at Jfokus and Devnexus earlier this year, signing up for this was a no-brainer.

I had a session about how to Get Started with Open Source. This is a topic near to my heart. It is also a topic a lot of interested people wonder about.

The Mentorship Hub is the best place to meet new community members, so I ended up hanging around that area most of the time between the sessions I listened to.

JavaOne for me is mostly about the hallway track. And the hallway track this year was just as good as last year. There is no place on the planet where you can bump into so many luminaries in the Java Community.

On Friday, the day after the conference, we had one of our two yearly face-to-face meetings in the Java Community Executive Committee.We had a lot of great presentations about what the different members are doing with and for the community. Since the meeting was held at the Oracle campus, it was a natural choice to take the group photo and some selfies in front of the Oracle sponsored Team USA America’s Cup boat outside one of the office buildings.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #324

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.

JavaLand 2026

JavaLand 2026 was finally back in the theme park after the last two year’s disaster at a car racing track. And this was good. Europa Park is different from Phantasialand, but has the same kitchy, German way of going all in being true to the theme. From the African and Chinese vibes in Phantasialand, we were now in Italy, Spain, France, and Marrakech. All mixed together in a way only possible in Germany.

1493 attendees is a very good number for a conference these days. And the German Java community is very vibrant and opinionated, so it is almost impossible to go from one end of the exhibition floor to another without stopping for a couple of conversations on the way. In my opinion, these hallway track conversations are the most important part of a conference, and JavaLand has a lot of them.

My talk, The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java, was set up in the Dome, which seats 700 people. It is hard to know the number of occupied chairs, but I estimate it to be somewhere between 100 and 150 attending my talk.

In the evening on the first day, the park opened up a couple of the attractions. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm passed by at that time, so going on a rollercoaster didn’t really tempt me. Dinner at one of the restaurants was a much better option. I don’t really like rollercoasters anyway, but that is a secret 🙂

One thing I missed year was the traditional JavaLand Jogging on Wednesday morning. Since I had arrived to the European time zone only a day before I travelled to JavaLand, I managed well without it. I did go for a short run on Thursday morning before breakfast, though.

Devnexus 2026

I can’t believe this was the ninth time I was a speaker at Devnexus. The last couple of years, we have sponsored and had a dedicated Jakarta EE track and the entire team present, so it was a bit different to be handling the booth as the only one from Eclipse Foundation present. This time, we shared the booth with MicroProfile in the community area. Luckily, I had great help from our community with staffing the booth. Mike, Emily, Rustam, Eudris, and Fred all helped out making it successful.

My talk, What Spring Developers Should Know About Jakarta EE, is a fairly popular talk that I have done a couple of times now. It was well attended and I received great feedback from the attendees afterward.

As always, the most important track at Devnexus is the Hallway Track. It is amazing how many good conversation it is possible to have over a few days when you hang out with 1400 attendees, speakers, volunteers, and others over a couple of days.

And, of course, we had the traditional #runWithJakartaEE morning runs. We usually run around the Mercedes Benz Stadium before finishing up the 5km in Centennial Olympic Park. The park is closed when we start running at 6:30AM, but opens up at 7:00AM, and that is about the time we return from the loop around the stadium.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #323

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…