Archive for September 2019
Eclipse Che 7 Enables Faster, Safer Development on Kubernetes
A major version release within the Eclipse Foundation community always provides us a reason to celebrate, congratulate, and thank all those who participated and contributed to the process. The delivery today of Eclipse Che 7 is no exception. But Che 7’s arrival is more than great news for the Eclipse community, it’s also an industry game changer because it drastically reduces the learning and adoption curves of Kubernetes for enterprise application developers.
Che 7 is the result of more than six years of collaboration and community contributions, including more than 20 vendors. It’s the world’s first Kubernetes-native IDE that has been built from the ground up specifically to enable developers to build cloud native applications. Fundamentally, Che 7 makes the developer and production environments the same on a scalable, collaborative, and secure platform specifically designed for building containerized applications. That platform addresses the major challenges developers face when working with Kubernetes.
While Kubernetes does a fantastic job of operating applications at scale, it’s a complex system that most developers do not yet fully understand. With Che 7, the workspace configuration complexities and challenges developers face with Kubernetes have been eliminated. The platform can be deployed on a public Kubernetes cluster or an on-premises data center. Once deployed, it provides centrally hosted private developer workspaces that make projects easy to share and easy to manage, but with enterprise-grade security.
Che 7 takes care of the “Kubernetization” of the development environment and the applications that a developer is building. It comes with a pre-packaged web-based IDE, based on an extended version of Eclipse Theia to provide an in-browser Visual Studio Code experience. The fully integrated environment containerizes everything a developer needs to develop, build, run, test, and debug enterprise cloud native applications. This includes all of the tools and dependencies. This a big deal considering many enterprises cite a lack of integration of development tools and processes as a primary challenge of container adoption.
The introduction of Che 7 represents another milestone in enterprise-grade, cloud native tooling innovation from the Eclipse Foundation and our community. It continues the Eclipse Foundation track record of delivering innovative tools to the development community, most notably through the Eclipse desktop IDE. Che is already integral to cloud native solutions from our vendor community, including Google, IBM, and Broadcom. It also comprises the core of Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, a new development environment for Red Hat OpenShift.
As we move forward, our community will continue to deliver more innovation through the Eclipse Cloud Development (ECD) Tools Working Group. In addition to Che, the ECD WG encompasses a broad portfolio of open source cloud development projects including Theia, Eclipse CodeWind, Eclipse Dirigible, Eclipse Sprotty, Eclipse Orion, and many more. The ECD WG will drive the evolution and adoption of de facto standards for cloud development tools, including language support, extensions, and developer workspace definitions.
Of course, Che 7 and the ECD WG are made possible by our development community. So, I thank all of those who have participated to date and encourage everyone to take part in the innovation process. To that end, we are actively recruiting members to the Eclipse Cloud Development Working group and we encourage and welcome new members.
Get started with Che 7 on any Kubernetes cluster at https://www.eclipse.org/che/ or learn more about getting started with Che at https://www.eclipse.org/che/getting-started/. To get involved with the Che community and contribute to the project, visit: https://github.com/eclipse/che/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
Welcome to the Future of Cloud Native Java
Today, with the release of Jakarta EE 8, we’ve entered a new era in Java innovation.
Under an open, vendor-neutral process, a diverse community of the world’s leading Java organizations, hundreds of dedicated developers, and Eclipse Foundation staff have delivered the Jakarta EE 8 Full Platform, Web Profiles, and related TCKs, as well as Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 certified as a Jakarta EE 8 compatible implementation.
To say this a big deal is an understatement. With 18 different member organizations, over 160 new committers, 43 projects, and a codebase of over 61 million lines of code in 129 Git repositories, this was truly a massive undertaking — even by the Eclipse community’s standards. There are far too many people to thank individually here, so I’ll say many thanks to everyone in the Jakarta EE community who played a role in achieving this industry milestone.
Here are some of the reasons I’m so excited about this release.
For more than two decades, Java EE has been the platform of choice across industries for developing and running enterprise applications. According to IDC, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on Java for mission-critical workloads. Jakarta EE 8 gives software vendors, more than 10 million Java developers, and thousands of enterprises the foundation they need to migrate Java EE applications and workloads to a standards-based, vendor-neutral, open source enterprise Java stack.
As a result of the tireless efforts of the Jakarta EE Working Group’s Specification Committee, specification development follows the Jakarta EE Specification Process and Eclipse Development Process, which are open, community-driven successors to the Java Community Process (JCP) for Java EE. This makes for a fully open, collaborative approach to generating specifications, with every decision made by the community — collectively. Combined with open source TCKs and an open process of self-certification, Jakarta EE significantly lowers the barriers to entry and participation for independent implementations.
The Jakarta EE 8 specifications are fully compatible with Java EE 8 specifications and include the same APIs and Javadoc using the same programming model developers have been using for years. The Jakarta EE 8 TCKs are based on and fully compatible with Java EE 8 TCKs. That means enterprise customers will be able to migrate to Jakarta EE 8 without any changes to Java EE 8 applications.
In addition to GlassFish 5.1 (which you can download here), IBM’s Open Liberty server runtime has also been certified as a Jakarta EE 8 compatible implementation. All of the vendors in the Jakarta EE Working Group plan to certify that their Java EE 8 implementations are compatible with Jakarta EE 8.
All of this represents an unprecedented opportunity for Java stakeholders to participate in advancing Jakarta EE to meet the modern enterprise’s need for cloud-based applications that resolve key business challenges. The community now has an open source baseline that enables the migration of proven Java technologies to a world of containers, microservices, Kubernetes, service mesh, and other cloud native technologies that have been adopted by enterprises over the last few years.
As part of the call to action, we’re actively seeking new members for the Jakarta EE Working Group. I encourage everyone to explore the benefits and advantages of membership. If Java is important to your business, and you want to ensure the innovation, growth, and sustainability of Jakarta EE within a well-governed, vendor-neutral ecosystem that benefits everyone, now is the time to get involved.
Also, if you’re interested in learning more about our community’s perspective on what cloud native Java is, why it matters so much to many enterprises, and where Jakarta EE technologies are headed, download our new free eBook, Fulfilling the Vision for Open Source, Cloud Native Java. Thank you to Adam Bien, Sebastian Daschner, Josh Juneau, Mark Little, and Reza Rahman for contributing their insights and expertise to the eBook.
Finally, if you’ll be at Oracle Code One at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week, be sure to stop by booth #3228, where the Eclipse community will be showcasing Jakarta EE 8, GlassFish 5.1, Eclipse MicroProfile, Eclipse Che, and more of our portfolio of cloud native Java open source projects.
Life at Eclipse 