Hashtag JakartaEE

Hashtag Jakarta EE #17

Welcome to the seventeenth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

The nomination period for the Jakarta EE Working group elections has closed. Now, it is up to the candidates to convince you why they should get YOUR vote. To help with this, I have offered each candidate a short Studio Jakarta EE interview.

“Vote for experience and continuity, vote for Werner!”
“Vote for real world experience, vote for Arjan!”

Next week, I will be conducting interviews with more of the candidates. So, tune in to Studio Jakarta EE to learn more about the candidates before casting your vote!

At the end of this hashtag, I want to remind you of the Jakarta EE 2020 Developer Survey.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #16

Welcome to the sixteenth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

I know, it’s Monday and I am one day late…I usually publish these Hashtags on Sundays. My excuse this time is that it was such beautiful weather and I was busy preparing my boat for the season. Totally slipped my mind, but here we go!

Have you nominated yourself to the Jakarta EE Elections yet? If you haven’t, there is still time. The nomination period ends on April 24, 2020.

Serving on one of the Jakarta EE committees is an excellent opportunity to increase your knowledge about governance in general and Jakarta EE specifically. It is the best way to influence the direction forward and be a part of shaping the future of Jakarta EE. Who knows, it may even boost your career!

I also want to remind you of the Jakarta EE 2020 Developer Survey. If you haven’t done so already, take 8 minutes to complete the survey today.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #15

Welcome to the fifteenth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

The nomination period for the Jakarta EE Working group elections has been extended until April 24, 2020. The adjusted election schedule is therefore like this:

Nomination Period: March 30 – April 24, 2020
Election Period: May 1 – May 15, 2020
Winning Candidates Announced: May 21, 2020

The elections were covered in the April Jakarta EE Community Call, where we also talked about how to contribute to Jakarta EE 9.

…and, please remember to take the Jakarta EE Developer Survey if you haven’t done so already.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #14

Welcome to the fourteenth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

It has been an interesting week in the Jakarta EE community. The work with Jakarta EE 9 makes progress, but we still need any help we can get from the community. Make sure you tune in to the Jakarta EE Update Call on Wednesday for more information about how you can help!

The ongoing thread on the Jakarta EE Community mailing list regarding creating a fork of MicroProfile Config as a basis for a Jakarta Config specification goes on. Please make sure to chime in with your opinion there.

I think this discussion shows that it is important that Jakarta EE states how the technical alignment with MicroProfile (as well as other potential candidates for standardization) should be from a Jakarta EE standpoint. The MicroProfile community selected a Pull approach, which in plain words means that they will not initiate any standardization efforts with Jakarta EE, or anywhere else. The Jakarta EE working group should come up with a similar strategy, or statement, for how the technical alignment should be from the Jakarta EE side in order to end this confusion.

In the end, a reminder that the nomination period for the Jakarta EE Working Group election ends on April 10, 2020.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #13

Welcome to the thirteenth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

EclipseCon 2020 is added to the long list of events that transforms into a virtual event this year. For those with an eye for detail will notice that the conference has changed the name from EclipseCon Europe to simply EclipseCon.

The name change has nothing to do with the decision to go virtual this year. EclipseCon is a global event and has been so for years, so removing the Europe part of the name just makes sense.

The seemingly never-ending story of creating a working group for Eclipse MicroProfile took an interesting turn at the end of this week. In an email to the Microprofile mailing list, Mike Milinkovich tasked the MicroProfile community to come up with a proposal for a MicroProfile Working Group Charter. This means that the efforts of creating a common working group or an Umbrella working group structure in relation to Jakarta EE have been put on hold.

I think it is a good thing that the discussions now can be around how to get the MicroProfile Working Group up and running so we can all focus our energy on technical challenges rather than governance.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #12

Welcome to the twelfth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I should have been speaking at JavaLand, one of my favorite conferences.

But as you are aware of, this conference was added to the long list of cancelled events this spring.

Being a Developer Advocate normally involves a lot of travel and interacting with people face-to-face. Now that we’re all grounded in one way or the other, I have been exploring the various options for creating video content, either by live-streaming or prerecorded sessions. It is a jungle! The rest of this post describes some of the efforts we have started up this week.

I am super happy with the free Crowdcast channel for JUGs that we were able to set up with funding from Jakarta EE. Make sure to add it to your bookmarks and follow the channel for updates on upcoming events.

This morning I created the Studio Jakarta EE YouTube channel and uploaded the first video, so I can now officially call my self a Youtuber 🙂

At the Eclipse Foundation, we will also start streaming a series of interviews, discussions and live events on the Eclipse Foundation Crowdcast channel.

If you are still hungry for more, take look at the recordings from last year’s Jakarta One LiveStream.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #11

Welcome to the eleventh issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

It’s been a special week. But at least, in our industry, we are pretty well equipped and used to remote working. Let’s just cross our fingers and hope that the measures taken will get the situation under control and we can get back to normal as soon as possible.

Supporting the Community

At the end of the week, we launched an initiative sponsored by the Jakarta EE Working Group to enable Java User Groups around the world to stream live events for free using our Crowdcast account. This will be available for at least as long as physical meetups are put on hold due to the Covid-19 situation.

Over to some updates about what is going on in the MicroProfile community.

Push vs Pull

The hangout this Tuesday was in entirety devoted to discussing the Pull vs Push approach for technical alignment with other standardization bodies, such as Jakarta EE. The vote is ongoing and will be closed Tuesday, March 17. Check out the MicroProfile Calendar for details about how to join the MicroProfile hangouts.

The current status of the voting indicates that the decision will be to go for a Pull model. What will this mean for Jakarta EE?

Implications of Pull

The obvious consequence of the Pull model is that if Jakarta EE decides to pull in a MicroProfile specification, it will essentially mean a fork. For those runtimes supporting either MicroProfile or Jakarta EE, but not both, it will be business as usual.

Those supporting both will have the headache of figuring out how to implement this. This will probably not be a hard nut to crack until one, or two of the tines of the fork, start evolving.

A possible Scenario

Let’s say that Jakarta EE decides to pull in MicroProfile Config and create a specification called Jakarta Config. The base package is changed from org.eclipse.microprofile.config to jakarta.config and the specification is added to the Jakarta EE Full and/or Web Profile.

Other Jakarta specifications are now free to reference Jakarta Config and implementations are required to implement it in order to be Jakarta EE Compatible. Products out there supporting both (e.g. OpenLiberty, WildFly, and Payara to mention a few open-source implementations), will now have two configuration options that are more or less identical.

Let’s say, then, that Jakarta Config adds a nifty feature. Should this feature be back-ported to MicroProfile Config? Or should MicroProfile Config be abandoned and Jakarta Config added to the base Jakarta specs required for MicroProfile?

I think these questions need to be addressed somehow, and that it is up to the vendors behind these initiatives to figure out a strategy that is in the best interest of their customers. It is a too easy way out to say that this will self-regulate by the community.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #10

Welcome to the tenth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Join me in celebrating the 10th issueversity of this series! I can’t believe we’re already at 10.

In the MicroProfile Hangout this week, the discussion around technical alignment with related technologies and standardization efforts (such as Jakarta EE) continued. Two approaches have crystallized themselves and the goal is to come to a decision at the hangout next week (Tuesday, March 10). The models discussed are push and pull.

The Pull Model implies that MicroProfile creates and evolves specifications without regard to downstream consumer requirements (e.g. Jakarta).

With the Push Model, MicroProfile specifications, when mature/stable, are transferred to external organizations (e.g. Jakarta EE).

As I mentioned above, the goal is to settle which approach to go for at the MicroProfile Hangout next week. Make sure to tune in to that one. Refer to the MicroProfile Calendar for details about the call.

The Virus

Due to Covid-19, a large number of events are being canceled. Those I had scheduled to speak at are dev.next, Red Hat Summit and IBM Think so far. All of these will be replaced by virtual events.

While virtual events are better than nothing, I don’t think they will ever be able to fully face-to-face events. The hallway discussions and the social benefit of actually meeting someone physically are what makes conferences irreplaceable. Looking forward to continuing to meet you all at the conference circuit later when the dust has settled. Meanwhile, I will participate in virtual events as well as smaller gatherings and meetups where they are possible to arrange.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #9

Welcome to the ninth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I had the pleasure of speaking at ConFoo in Montreal. It was my second time speaking at this conference. This was the 18th edition and the number of attendees has increased every year. 839 registered attendees this year!

My first talk was a live coding session where I demoed most aspects of Eclipse MicroProfile.

On the second day, I did the Microservice Patterns talk where I go through a list of microservice patterns and show how each of them is implemented with Eclipse MicroProfile.

An interesting observation regarding the strength of the various brands is that when I did a poll at the beginning of both my talks, about 5% had heard about MicroProfile, about 50% about Jakarta EE and 100% had heard about Spring Boot. It should be noted that ConFoo is originally a PHP conference that has extended out to include more technologies, so the audience was not necessarily 100% hardcore server-side Java developers. But still interesting to see how the awareness of Jakarta EE is growing.

To round of wit something sweet; after the conference, we went on a trip to a Sugar shack outside of Montreal.

The favorite on the table I were seated were bacon with maple syrup!

Hashtag Jakarta EE #8

Welcome to the eigth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I was at Devnexus in Atlanta. This awesome conference organized by the Atlanta Java User Group has established itself as the place to be if you are a Java developer. This year with 2400 attendees and an amazing line-up of world-class speakers.

On the evening the first day of the conference, the Eclipse Foundation hosted a Cloud Native for Java Meetup. More than 100 participants came together for food, drinks and technical discussions around Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile.

My talk What’s Going on with Jakarta EE was well received by those who attended. I gave an update on Jakarta EE 9 as well as outlining many of the various ways of getting involved.

The Jakarta EE booth was located in the community corner of the exhibition hall together with Apache, OSI, and AdoptOpenJDK. We had a great time there with lots of good discussions.