The Jakarta EE 9.1 release is coming up shortly. The release review ballot for ratification of the specification will start this week. A special detail regarding this release is that there will be at least three, possibly four, compatible implementations used for ratification. Eclipse GlassFish, OpenLiberty, and WildFly have submitted their Compatibility Certification Requests already. We hope that Apache TomeEE will make it as well!
The plan reviews for individual specifications are ongoing. You can follow their progress by checking out the pull requests labeled plan review. As they are approved, they will pop up on their respective page under Jakarta EE Specifications.
I want to remind you about the Jakarta EE Specifications Calendar, where the specification projects are encouraged to publish there calls in order to allow more people to join the discussions.
These CCRs will be used in the ratification of the final Jakarta EE 9.1 specification. This time, we are hoping for additional compatible implementations to be a part of the material reviewed by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. Since we plan to initiate the release review ballot on April 30, it is time to start preparing the Compatibility Certification Requests by following these steps outlined by the Jakarta EE TCK project lead Scott Marlow.
The 2021 Jakarta EE Developer Survey is still running. If you haven’t answered it yet, I encourage you to take this opportunity to provide input to the direction of Jakarta EE. It only takes a couple of minutes to answer.
The CFP for EclipseCon 2021 is open. Don’t hesitate, submit your Jakarta EE talk today! If you are new to speaking, or unsure what to talk about, ask someone in the community to team up with you and do a joint talk!
EclipseCon 2021 will be an online event this year as well. It was a success in 2020 and the intention is to be at least as good this year! Hopefully, we will return to a live event in Ludwigsburg next year. But until then, submit your talk to EclipseCon 2021!
Personally, I hope to see as many Jakarta EE talks as possible. Let’s make it a really hard job for the program committee by submitting as many abstracts as possible. There is so much great content to choose from, so go ahead and submit a talk about your favorite Jakarta EE topic. I, for sure, will submit a couple myself.
Here’s a tip if you are new to speaking: Ask someone in the community to team up with you and do a joint talk.
These are the important dates to remember: April 15: Call for Proposals open June 1: Early-Bird Submission Deadline June 15: Final Submission Deadline July 1: Notification Sent
This is the fourth Jakarta EE Developer Survey, so it is safe to say that it has become an annual tradition and is your chance to influence the direction of the Jakarta EE working group. The survey last year had more than 2000 responses from individuals around the World. Let’s beat that number this year! It provides valuable insight into the state of the community to better understand the top priorities for future Jakarta EE releases. The survey takes less than 8 minutes to complete, so don’t hesitate!
Eclipse GlassFish 6.1.0.RC1 passes the Jakarta EE 9.1 TCK and is available for download. The TCK project is in the process of wrapping up everything for the release. We plan to initiate the review ballot for the Jakarta EE 9.1 specifications on April 30, which means that the artifacts will be released to Maven Central on May 14th. This is a soft launch as we have been doing the last couple of releases, so the official release date with all the marketing splash around it will be May 25th.
Worth noting for this release is that it looks like GlassFish won’t be alone as a compatible implementation when the specification is ratified. A number of vendors are working hard to have their implementations available along with Glassfish for the release review ballot.
I guess it is safe to say that we were blown away by the number of detailed plans and outlines submitted as pull requests to the Jakarta EE Specifications repository. Just take a look at the list below grouped by major and minor updates to the specifications.
Major updates Jakarta Authentication 4.0 Jakarta Authorization 3.0 Jakarta Concurrency 3.0 Jakarta Expression Language 5.0 Jakarta Faces 4.0 Jakarta JSON Binding 3.0 Jakarta RESTful Web Services 4.0 Jakarta Security 3.0 Jakarta Servlet 6.0 Jakarta SOAP with Attachments 3.0 Jakarta Standard Tag Library 3.0 Jakarta XML Binding 4.0 Jakarta XML Web Services 4.0
Minor updates Jakarta Activation 2.1 Jakarta Connectors 2.1 Jakarta JSON Processing 2.1 Jakarta Mail 2.1 Jakarta MVC 2.1 Jakarta Persistence 3.1 Jakarta Server Pages 3.1 Jakarta WebSocket 2.1
I can’t wait to dive into the details of these plans as they progress through the plan reviews stipulated by the Jakarta EE Specifiation Process. Take a look at the JESP Guide for a simple walk-through of the process.
In addition to the efforts around Jakarta EE 9.1 and Jakarta EE 10, there are ongoing discussions about the alignment between Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. These discussions take place in the CN4J Alliance. Read Jakarta EE/MicroProfile Alignment Survey Results! by Reza Rahman to see how the community responded to the alternatives being discussed.
One of the most exciting things that happened in the Jakarta EE space this week is that the Jakarta EE Platform project decided to start working on a new Jakarta EE Core Profile. The Pull Request to start the process of creation- and plan reviews from the Jakarta EE Specification Committee has been created. I will post more when work progresses.
If you are involved in a Jakarta EE specification project, do remember to submit a request for plan review by April 15. This will make it possible for the platform team to get an overview, and plan for the content of the next release. Refer to the JESP Guide for useful pointers and links to help you navigate the Jakarta EE Specification Process (JESP).
The 2021 Jakarta EE Developer Survey is now open. This has become an annual tradition and is your chance to influence the direction of the Jakarta EE working group. It takes less than 8 minutes to complete.
Jakarta EE 9.1 is on track for the mid-May release. GlassFish 6.1 now passes the TCK and a release candidate will be made available this week.
Meanwhile, the work with planning for the next Jakarta EE release goes on. We are getting very close to be proposing a new profile in addition to the current Full Platform and Web Profile. This profile will most likely be called Jakarta EE Core Profile and be specifically targeted at smaller runtimes for microservices and capable of producing minimal cloud-native images.
For the other component specifications, please do remember to submit a request for plan review by April 15. This will make it possible for the platform team to get an overview, and plan for the content of the next release. We will also shortly invite all specification projects to participate in a community meeting. Stay tuned and look out for the invite that will be socialized on all appropriate channels when we have nailed down the details.
I will encourage specification projects to open calls to help drive their work forward. Since we currently don’t meet in the hallways at events and conferences, these meetings are an important way of having discussions in realtime. Makes life on the mailing lists so much easier afterward…
We have created the Specifications Calendar specifically for this purpose. All the project leads of Jakarta EE specification projects have been given permissions to add events to the calendar.
Over the past year, the Eclipse Foundation spoke to leading Java developers around the world to discuss why they rely on Jakarta EE and the unique benefits of using Jakarta EE technologies. Their input is captured in our white paper, which describes the important advantages Jakarta EE offers today and for the future.
With Jakarta EE’s long history as Java EE, it’s sometimes easy for developers to dismiss the technology as yesterday’s approach. But Jakarta EE technologies are embedded, and relied upon, in a way no other technologies are. Here are some examples you might not be aware of:
Apache Tomcat implements several Jakarta EE specifications
Eclipse Jetty is a certified implementation of Jakarta Servlet 5.0
Spring Boot embeds Eclipse Jetty or Apache Tomcat as a runtime
Open Specifications Bring Important Advantages
One of the advantages every one of the developers raised was the value of the specification-based approach to technologies in Jakarta EE.
The clear boundary between fully tested specifications and underlying implementations means developers can easily switch between the implementations with minimal impact on the application code. This agility saves considerable time, effort, and money when changes are required.
Jakarta EE Provides a Unique Combination of Features and Functions
The developers also described a combination of strategic and technical advantages that aren’t available in any other platform. Some of the main Jakarta EE benefits they noted include:
Stability and backward compatibility. Jakarta EE provides a mature and proven foundation for innovation that allows organizations to fully leverage the investments they’ve already made in enterprise Java applications.
Architectural flexibility. Organizations can support cloud-based microservices architectures, as well as traditional, monolithic architectures. They can also seamlessly incorporate newer technologies, such as MicroProfile, Docker containers, and Kubernetes orchestration.
Speed and simplicity. A Jakarta EE application can be set up with significantly less configuration compared to other frameworks.
Development and deployment freedom. Developers can use any Jakarta EE-compatible runtime, and they can implement and blend whichever aspects of the application server are needed to leverage Jakarta EE capabilities in a modern and efficient way.
Longevity. The open, vendor-neutral, and community-driven approach at the Eclipse Foundation ensures applications developed using Jakarta EE will remain relevant and usable over the long term.
Get the Full Story
These insights are just a few of the reasons leading Java developers remain committed to Jakarta EE. For the complete story, download the white paper.
It looks like Jakarta EE 9.1 may be delivered sometime in May. The Jakarta EE Platform project discussed the possibility for a release date in mid-May at this week’s platform call. There are still a couple of details to be sorted out before a final date can be announced. Stay tuned for updates.
The platform team has also started discussions regarding adding a profile to the next release of Jakarta EE. This discussion is currently going on the mailing list.
On Wednesday, March 31, I am giving a short keynote at JakartaOne LivesStream – Russian. What’s interesting about this one is that it will be in Russian. Since I, unfortunately, don’t speak Russian, the organizers have been very helpful in translating my talk and adding a Russian audio track. I hope you will enjoy it!
If you still can’t get enough of Jakarta EE, please don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to host us at your local JUG or Meetup. We still offer free use of Crowdcast for JUGs for streaming your events.
Tanja and I are always eager to visit you and talk about Jakarta EE. We have visited a lot of JUGs in the last 6 months. And we want to visit more. If you want your JUG on this list, you know what to do. Contact us!
At the end, I want to point you to the new Adoptium web site that was just recently launched. This is your one stop shop to download prebuilt OpenJDK binaries for free.
$ java -version
openjdk version "16" 2021-03-16
OpenJDK Runtime Environment AdoptOpenJDK (build 16+36)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM AdoptOpenJDK (build 16+36, mixed mode, sharing)
Java 16 contains a lot of goodies for us, so go ahead and download it to give it a try. or me, the most important feature in JDK 16 is Records (JEP 395). The reason for this is that it reduces the amount of boilerplate code needed. The possibility to write record Point(int x, int y) { } rather than the entire class listed below really appeals to me. The code never written is the best code, as it is guaranteed not to contain any bugs.
class Point {
private final int x;
private final int y;
Point(int x, int y) {
this.x = x;
this.y = y;
}
int x() { return x; }
int y() { return y; }
public boolean equals(Object o) {
if (!(o instanceof Point)) return false;
Point other = (Point) o;
return other.x == x && other.y = y;
}
public int hashCode() {
return Objects.hash(x, y);
}
public String toString() {
return String.format("Point[x=%d, y=%d]", x, y);
}
}
I participated in three sessions at JavaLand 2021. First out on Tuesday was Jakarta EE 9 and Beyond which was followed by a Jakarta EE Panel. On Wednesday, it was time for Mobile Java Web Applications with MVC and OpenDDR where I was presenting together with Werner Keil. Despite some technical difficulties with the streaming platform on Tuesday, the conference went smoothly. Let’s hope that we will be back in Phantasialand for next year’s edition!
Work with Jakarta EE 9.1 continues. An agenda item for the platform call this week is to set a release date for Jakarta EE 9.1. We have also started the work by looking ahead towards the next releases. Currently, there are some interesting discussions happening on the Jakarta EE Platform mailing list regarding the definition of new profile specifications.
Also, note that the platform team requests plan reviews from the specification projects to be ready for ballot by April 15 in order to be a candidate for the next release. If you are unsure what to do for a plan review, check out the JESP Guide.
