Life at Eclipse

Cloud Native for Java (CN4J) Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe will be the first time the best and brightest minds from the Java ecosystem and the Kubernetes ecosystem come together at one event to collaborate and share their expertise.

The all-day event on March 30 includes expert talks, demos, and thought-provoking sessions focused on building cloud native enterprise applications using Jakarta EE-based microservices on Kubernetes. CN4J Day is a proud moment for all of us at the Eclipse Foundation as it confirms the Jakarta EE and MicroProfile communities are at the forefront of fulfilling the promise of cloud native Java. We’re excited to be working with our friends at the CNCF to offer this event co-located with KubeCon Europe.

A Unique Opportunity to Engage With Global Experts

The timing of CN4J Day could not be better. With momentum toward the Jakarta EE 9 release building, this event gives all of us an important and truly unique opportunity to:

•     Learn more about the future of cloud native Java development from industry and community leaders
•     Gain deeper insight into key aspects of Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, and Kubernetes technologies
•     Meet and share ideas with global Java and Kubernetes ecosystem innovators

The global Java ecosystem has embraced CN4J day and several of its leading minds will be on-hand to share their insights. Along with keynote addresses from my colleague Tanja Obradovic and IBM Java CTO, Tim Ellison, CN4J Day features informative technical talks from Java experts and Eclipse Foundation community members, such as:

•     Adam Bien, an internationally recognized Java architect, developer, workshop leader, and author
•     Sebastian Daschner, lead java developer advocate at IBM
•     Clement Escoffier, principal software engineer at Red Hat
•     Ken Finnegan, senior principal engineer at Red Hat
•     Emily Jiang, liberty architect for MicroProfile and CDI at IBM
•     Dmitry Kornilov, Jakarta EE and Helidon Team Leader at Oracle
•     Tomas Langer, Helidon Architect & Developer at Oracle

Major Industry and Ecosystem Endorsement

Leading industry players in the Java ecosystem are also showing their support for CN4J Day through sponsorship. Our sponsors include:

•     Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
•     IBM
•     Oracle
•     Red Hat

The event is being coordinated by an independent program committee composed of Arun Gupta, principal technologist at Amazon Web Services, Reza Rahman, principal program manager for Java on Azure at Microsoft, and Tanja Obradovic, program manager for Jakarta EE at the Eclipse Foundation.

Register Today

To register today, simply add the event to your KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe registration. Thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, a limited amount of discounted CN4J Day add-on registrations will be made available to Jakarta EE and MicroProfile community members on a first-come, first-served basis.

For more details about CN4J Day and a link to the registration page, click here. For additional questions regarding this event, please reach out to events-info@eclipse.org.

As additional speakers and sponsors come onboard, we’ll keep you posted, so watch for updates in our blogs and newsletters.

On behalf of the Jakarta EE Working Group, I am excited to announce the unanimous approval of the plan for Jakarta EE 9, with an anticipated mid-2020 release. Please note that the project team believes this timeline is aggressive, so think of this as a plan of intent with early estimate dates. The milestone dates will be reviewed and possibly adjusted at each release review.

If you have any interest at all in the past, present, or future of Java, I highly recommend that you read that plan document, as Jakarta EE 9 represents a major inflection point in the platform.

The key elements of  this Jakarta EE 9 release plan are to:

• move all specification APIs to the jakarta namespace (sometimes referred to as the “big bang”);
• remove unwanted or deprecated specifications;
• minor enhancements to a small number of specifications;
• add no new specifications, apart from specifications pruned from Java SE 8 where appropriate; and
• Java SE 11 support.

What is not in the plan is the addition of any significant new functionality. That is because the goals of this Jakarta EE 9 release plan are to:

• lower the barrier of entry to new vendors and implementations to achieve compatibility;
• make the release available rapidly as a platform for future innovation; and
• provide a platform that developers can use as a stable target for testing migration to the new namespace.

Moving a platform and ecosystem the size and scale of Jakarta EE takes time and careful planning. After a great deal of discussion the community consensus was that using EE 9 to provide a clear transition to the jakarta namespace, and to pare down the platform would be the best path to future success. While work on the EE 9 platform release is proceeding, individual component specification teams are encouraged to innovate in their individual specifications, which will hopefully lead to a rapid iteration towards the Jakarta EE 10 release.

Defining this release plan has been an enormous community effort. A lot of time and energy went into its development. It has been exciting to watch the … ummm passionate…. discussions evolve towards a pretty broad consensus on this approach. I would like to particularly recognize the contributions of Steve Millidge, Kevin Sutter, Bill Shannon, David Blevins, and Scott Stark for their tireless and occasionally thankless work in guiding this process.

The Jakarta EE Working Group has been busy working on creating a Program Plan, Marketing Plan and Budget for 2020. The team has also been very busy with creating a plan for the Jakarta EE 9 release. The Jakarta EE Platform project team, as requested, has delivered a proposal plan to the Steering Committee. With their endorsement, it will be voted on by the Specification Committee at their first meeting in January 2020.

Retrospective

The Jakarta EE 9 release is going to be an important step in the evolution of the platform, but it is important to recognize the many accomplishments that happened in 2019 that made this plan possible.

First, the Eclipse Foundation and Oracle successfully completed some very complex negotiations about how Java EE would be evolved under the community-led Jakarta EE process. Although the Jakarta EE community cannot evolve the specifications under the javax namespace, we were still able to fully transition the Java EE specifications to the Eclipse Foundation. That transition led to the second major accomplishment in 2019: the first release of Jakarta EE. Those two milestones were, in my view, absolutely key accomplishments. They were enabled by a number of other large efforts, such as creating the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process, significant revisions to our IP Policy, and establishing the Jakarta EE compatibility program. But ultimately, the most satisfying result of all of this effort is the fact that we have seven fully compatible Jakarta EE 8 products, with more on the way.

The Jakarta EE community was also incredibly active in 2019. Here are just a few of the highlights:

• JakartaOne Livestream was a great success, with over 1400 attendees from around the world enjoying eighteen hours of material.
• Jakarta EE is a 2019 Duke’s Choice Award Winner, recognizing its open source contribution.
• We published the second annual Jakarta EE Developers Survey.

2019 was a very busy year, and it laid the foundation for a very successful 2020. I, and the entire Jakarta EE community, look forward to the exciting progress and innovation coming in 2020.

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.