As always, stay connected with the progress by joining the mailing lists and the public calls. Especially the weekly Jakarta EE Platform call. Details published on the Jakarta EE Specifications Public Calendar. If you’re for some reason not able to, check out the meeting minutes.
Eclipse Foundation turned 18 this week! Reply to the tweet and tell what an 18-year old is old enough to do in your country!
The release reviews for the various specifications targeting Jakarta EE 10 are adding up. You can follow the progress of the reviews by looking at the Pull Requests with the materials and/or by following the ballot threads on the Public Jakarta EE Specification Committee mailing list.
There have been some discussions going on the various mailing lists regarding how to stage and release milestones and release candidates of the specification artifacts. To help with this, the Jakarta EE Platform project has written up guidelines for Milestones and Release Candidates on the Jakarta EE Platform Project Wiki.
The specification project for Jakarta RPC that I mentioned in #107 has been approved and is being set up as we speak. Join the Jakarta RPC mailing list if you are interested in participating in the project, or just want to know firsthand what’s being discussed.
My first conference of 2022 is a wrap! Read all about it in my write-up of CodeMash 2022. In-person conferences are possible in these pre-post-pandemic times as long as care is taken and local regulations are followed. The next in-person conference I am speaking at is SnowOne in Novosibirsk, Russia. There are some moving parts to be sorted out first with regard to visas, covid-regulations, and other disruptions that may or may not happen, but hopefully, I will know more in the coming days.
Before that, I will speak at the upcoming virtual jChampions Conference. This is a conference where all the speakers are Java Champions, and it is totally free! Imagine that!
So, what is going on with Jakarta EE 10? The minutes from the weekly platform call are always a good place to look for information. Another place is the Jakarta EE Platform project mailing list which is pretty active these days. There are still two weeks until the ballot for Jakarta Activation 2.1 closes. The usual ballot period for release reviews is 14 days, but for this one, it was extended to four weeks to compensate for the holiday period.
A new specification (Jakarta RPC) has been proposed and the creation review ballot is ongoing for approval by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. The main goal of Jakarta RPC is to make gRPC easier to use within the Jakarta EE ecosystem. It is exciting to see new specifications like this one being proposed. It shows that the goal of establishing Jakarta EE as a platform for innovation is succeeding.
The Jakarta EE Platform team started 2022 with the weekly calls on January 4. These calls happen every Tuesday at 11:00 ET and are open for anyone interested to join. Check the Jakarta EE Specifications public calendar for details. These calls are an excellent opportunity to discuss matters directly with everyone involved. Don’t underestimate the power of direct, synchronous communication! Especially in these times where we are stuck behind our webcams, with email threads and slack channels flowing over and important information tending to get lost in the ever-increasing amount of spam hitting us every day. If you miss a call or are interested in seeing what is being discussed, check out the meeting minutes.
The first milestone of Spring 6.0 was released this week. Check out Juergen Hoeller’s announcement. For those of you waiting for Spring Boot 3.0, the good news is that there is a milestone planned to be released later in January. Spring 6 and Spring Boot 3 are the first versions of Spring supporting the jakarta.* namespace.
2021 is soooo last year as we now are entering 2022. This year is an important year for the Jakarta EE Community. First and foremost, 2022 is the year of Jakarta EE 10! It looks like the final release will slip a little into Q2, but the work with getting the first specifications over the finishing line is progressing. Just before New Year, Jakarta Activation 2.1 was put forward for ballot by the Jakarta EE Specification Committee. More specifications will follow now that we start returning to our desks and webcams again after a well-deserved holiday.
I’m sure most of you have better things to do during the holidays than reading my rambling here, so I will keep this issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE short.
The Jakarta EE Tutorial has been updated to match Jakarta EE 9.1. You can find it by navigating to https://start.jakarta.ee or accessing it directly here. If you are interested in contributing to open source, the tutorial, and other Jakarta EE learning resources are excellent places to start. For example, the First Cup of Jakarta EE needs to be updated to the latest version.
I guess I have to mention logging in one way or the other this week. A lot of good stuff has been written and communicated about this. All I want to say is that you should follow the advice to always use the latest recommended versions of your dependencies. Another piece of advice I will throw in is that you should always consider whether you actually need that particular dependency you just added. Take logging, for example. I have always been happy with Java Util Logging (JUL). It is provided for me by the platform, and provides the functionality I have needed.
package dukes;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
class DukeLogs {
public static final Logger LOGGER = Logger.getLogger("dukes");
void doStuff() {
LOGGER.info(() -> "Duke says hello");
}
}
This may not be the case for everyone. Log4j provides a lot of useful stuff that you may benefit from in your particular use case. But if you choose to rely on third-party dependencies, always make sure that you follow the recommendations to which version to use (usually the latest)!
I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did hosting the event! Don’t worry if you missed some of the talks, we have got you covered. All the videos from the talks and the Studio Jakarta EE sessions will be made available on the Jakarta EE YouTube Channel shortly.
Here is a reminder of the Jakarta EE social cards made available for you to use freely. Pick the card that fits your engagement and spread the word!
There is a new project proposal for Jakarta Commons. The intention of this project is to be a shared space for the community to define utilities, annotations, and APIs to be used by other Jakarta specification projects. Please take a look at it and provide feedback on the proposal creation tracking issue.
