Welcome to issue number two hundred and eleven of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

January is usually not a very busy month regarding conferences and events, and 2024 is no exception so far. It is not until the end of the month that I have something planned. But from there, the pace picks up significantly. I am going on a short trip to the US where I will participate in the celebration of 25 years of the Java Community Process (JCP). While there, I will also speak at several Java User Groups. So far, my schedule looks like this:

Jan 25: JCP 25-year Anniversary Celebration
Jan 29: Nashville JUG
Jan 30: Seattle JUG (soon to be published)
Jan 31: Portland JUG (planning in progress)
Feb 1: available

I am trying to get in touch with the San Diego JUG for an event on February 1, but without success so far. Please reach out to me If you are involved in this JUG, or another one within a couple of hours’ flight distance from the West Coast and able to host a meetup.

The major discussion within the Jakarta EE Platform project this week has been around Java SE versions. After the Jakarta EE Working Group Steering Committee passed a resolution stating the goal to target Java 21 with Jakarta EE 11, this has been the expectation set in the plan for the platform project. It now turns out that some of the vendors want to lower this requirement to Java 17. The discussions following this have been around how to handle this while delivering according to the timeline outlined in the release plan.

The important thing to note here is that even if we made it possible to certify an implementation for Jakarta EE 11 on Java 17, it will still be able to certify an implementation on Java 21. So for end users, the application developers, it would mean that you could use Java 21 features if the implementation selected supports it. I am sure there will be more on this topic in the following days. I will make sure to revisit it in the next Hashtag Jakarta EE. Stay tuned!