Oracle Groundbreaker APAC Tour 2018

This year, I was so lucky to get the chance to be part of the Oracle Groundbreaker APAC Tour 2018. The cities that I joined the tour was Perth and Melbourne in Australia as well as Wellington in New Zealand.

Perth, Australia

Copenhagen – (Singapore) – Perth
Gone swimming…

In Perth, I did a talk called Serverless with Java. I demoed various FaaS options available, including running Fn Project on Oracle Cloud. Between the sessions, I also managed to slip outside for a swim in the ocean.

Melbourne, Australia

Perth – Melbourne
New bush hat

In Melbourne, I had two sessions scheduled. The first was an informal Q&A with the local Java User Group. We had great discussions regarding the 6 months release cadence of Java, we discussed Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile and talked about Java development and Java user groups in general.

Later that afternoon, I did my Serverless with Java talk for a small, but an enthusastic crowd. 

Wellington, New Zealand

Melbourne – Wellington
Installing fn on OKE

The last stop on the journey was Wellington, New Zealand. Even here, it was the Serverless with Java talk that was put on the schedule.

To spice things up a little, I did a last minute try to get fn up and running on a managed Kubernetes cluster in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

I was close, so the next time I do this talk this will be part of the demos…

Wrap up

This was a fantastic trip, even considering the busy travel schedule and probably spending more time in the air or at airports than on the ground. The trip home from Wellington took ~36 hours door-to-door with short layovers in Auckland, Perth, and Singapore.

WLG – AKL
AKL – PER
PER – SIN
SIN – CPH

Source Code

The Function Duke project on GitHub contains all the source code for my serverless talks.

While Waiting for Jakarta EE

It is more than a year since Oracle announced the transfer of Java™ EE to Eclipse Foundation at JavaOne 2017. Since then, a lot has happened:

  • Java™ EE 8 API and implementation projects have been set up under EE4J.
  • The Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 release is approaching.
  • A brand new Jakarta EE specification process is right around the corner.
  • Community shows involvement regarding the technical direction of Jakarta EE.
  • The Jakarta EE NoSQL specification project proposal has been created.

This is all very good, excellent actually! When you think about the size of it all, it is actually quite an achievement. We are talking about 7.7 million lines of code! More than 60.000 files and a total of 38 new projects that have been set up at the Eclipse Foundation.

But, as everyone knows, developers are impatient and eager to try out everything new, so there are still a couple of questions that I always get when talking about Jakarta EE:

  • When can I start developing Jakarta EE applications?
  • How does Eclipse MicroProfile fit in this picture?

The answer to the first question is: “not yet”. Until the Jakarta EE specification process is finalized, the technologies are still Java™ EE. 

The answer to the second question differs a little depending on who you ask, but usually is something in the lines of “I am pretty sure that some of the MicroProfile specs will be integrated into Jakarta EE when they have proven to be useful”.

So, what should an eager developer do in the meantime? Switch to Spring Boot…ouch…or…JavaScript…squeal…?

NO, here is what you should do: Use the power of Java™ EE 8 and combine it with Eclipse MicroProfile.

Many of the application server vendors have added MicroProfile features to their Java™ EE 8 compliant or certified application servers. Examples are Open Liberty, WildFly, Payara and Apache TomEE. See the respective vendor’s documentation for which versions they have included.

Java EE 8 with Eclipse MicroProfile 2.1

I have put together a simple application called Jakarta EE Duke to demonstrate how to do this. The application uses the @ConfigProperty annotation from MicroProfile Config to configure a message as well as the new @Email annotation from Bean Validation 2.0, which came with Java™ EE 8 to validate input.

While this example is extremely simple, it does indicate how you can combine the full power of Java™ EE 8 with the lightweight APIs of MicroProfile to implement cloud-native microservices using Java™ technology.

One last tip: Make sure to join the Jakarta EE Community Mailing list to always stay up-to-date on the latest development of Jakarta EE.

JCP Elections 2018

Time flies like a banana…

It is almost two years since I was elected to the Java Community Process Executive Committee and the end of my term as a holder of one of the two associate seats are approaching. That means that the elections for representatives in the EC is going on, and you have a choice to make!

If you are an associate member of the JCP and haven’t already decided who to vote for in the ongoing election, please read my position statement for a motivation why you should vote for me.

“A vote for me is a vote for the Community“
 – Ivar Grimstad

#JavaOneStreak revamped to #GetFitForCodeOne

The last couple of years, we have been running a concept called JavaOneStreak the month before JavaOne. Since JavaOne is history, and the event replacing it is Oracle Code One, it makes sense to renew this concept as well. 

The original JavaOneStreak was to run a mile a day for in last month before the conference and tweet about it using the hashtag #JavaOneStreak.

For this year’s Oracle Code One, I want to expand the concept to include any physical exercise.

How does it work?

1. Work out (yes, you have to get out of that chair!)
2. Log your move using your favorite activity tracker (e.g. Endomondo)
3. Tweet about it using the hashtags #GetFitForCodeOne and #CodeOne (for extra exposure)

If you join the challenge on Endomondo, you will get listed below:

Eclipse GlassFish Release Plan

UPDATED!

Yesterday, the release plan for Eclipse GlassFish was announced on the EE4J mailing list. For convenience, I have repeated the plan here:

September 18
All code required for GF build contributed.

September 23
Eclipse GlassFish builds.

October 1
Java EE 8 CTS testing. We are able to run CTS tests on Eclipse GlassFish.

October 22 ⚡
CI/CD release pipelines completed.

October 22
Eclipse GlassFish 5.1-RC1 milestone release.

November 5 ⚡
Dependencies updated. All projects are released to OSSRH and have dependencies to Eclipse version of other components.

November 30 ⚡
Release Review completed.

December 14 ⚡
Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 release. All CTS tests are passed.

There is a lot of work to do, so every contribution is appreciated, especially regarding setting up the CI/CD pipelines for all the EE4J projects. Take a look at our status sheet and sign up where you think you can contribute.

Ozark becomes Eclipse Krazo

One of the requirements for Eclipse Projects is that the name is not associated with any trademarks or potential trademarks. When we created the project proposal for Ozark, this turned out to be the case here. The name Ozark is simply used too many places for it to be a valid Eclipse project name.

So, how did we come up with the new name? First of all, we asked for input on the Ozark developer mailing list. We also wrote a small program that generated all permutations of ‘ozark’ to see if something cool came out of that.

public static void main(String[] args) {
    new Permutations().permutations("ozark").stream()
            .forEach(System.out::println);
}

Then we started filtering, discussion and voting until we ended up with Krazo, which turns out to be Ozark spelled backward. We are really excited about the new name and hope you all will join us in spreading the word that the reference implementation of MVC 1.0 that was previously known as Ozark is now called Eclipse Krazo.

Setting sails for Jakarta EE!

The future of Cloud Native Java with Jakarta EE is here! The Jakarta EE website was launched today with lots of information, news and resources, including the new results of the 2018 Developer Survey.I even got my blog posts about the relationship between Jakarta EE, EE4J and Java EE listed in FAQ section. The website even features the new Jakarta EE logo.

I should be honest and say that it wasn’t my first choice when I voted, but when I see it in use with different colors and backgrounds, I must admit that it looks pretty good.

The initial strategic and participating members of the Jakarta EE working group are also listed on the website.

It is pretty awesome to see this list of companies participating and supporting Jakarta EE! And the list is likely to expand as more companies join. The future of Cloud Native Java is Jakarta EE, and the future looks bright. Let’s set the sails and sail towards the future (finally got the logo, I think…).

https://jakarta.ee

 

JavaOne becomes Oracle Code One

My first JavaOne was in 1999 and I have attended almost every one since then, first as an attendee and since 2013 as a speaker. Attending JavaOne has always been one of the highlights of the year. This is where the community meets, announcements are being made and plans laid. I don’t think this will change even if the JavaOne name is replaced by Oracle Code One as was announced yesterday.

https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/javaone-event-expands-with-more-tracks-languages-and-communities-and-new-name

The most important aspect of JavaOne has always been the community and the people. It is kind of sad that the name goes away, but I am confident that we will be able to embrace Oracle Code One with the same community spirit as we did with JavaOne.

Running Eclipse MicroProfile on IBM Cloud

In this post, I am following up on the post series about Running Eclipse MicroProfile applications in Oracle Cloud by showing how to do it in IBM Cloud Foundry, which includes runtimes for Java, Node.js, ASP.NET Core, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift and Go.

I am using the same simple application called CloudEE Duke as in the previous posts and will show how to deploy it in the Liberty for Java™ runtime. Since the liberty  profile is it is already configured to build using the Liberty Maven Plugin, the only thing you need to do is to activate this profile:

mvn clean package -Pliberty

See the complete pom.xml to see the complete configuration.

Since CloudEE Duke is an Eclipse MicroProfile application, you need to use the packaged server deployment option in order to activate the required features of Liberty. This is done by running the server package  command from the Liberty server directory produced by the Liberty Maven Plugin.

target/liberty/wlp/bin/server package defaultServer --include=usr

The server package  command produces a .zip file that can be pushed to IBM Cloud with the Cloud Foundry CLI as shown here:

cf push cloudee-duke -p target/liberty/wlp/usr/servers/defaultServer/defaultServer.zip

When your application is deployed, you should be able to access the hello endpoint

https://cloudee-duke.eu-gb.mybluemix.net/hello
Duke says Hello!

As ususal, you will also have the health and metrics endpoints provided by the MicroProfile implementation

https://cloudee-duke.eu-gb.mybluemix.net/health
{
outcome: “UP”,
checks: [ ]
}

https://cloudee-duke.eu-gb.mybluemix.net/metrics
# TYPE base:classloader_total_loaded_class_count counter
# HELP base:classloader_total_loaded_class_count Displays the total number of classes that have been loaded since the Java virtual machine has started execution.
base:classloader_total_loaded_class_count 10744
# TYPE base:gc_global_count counter
…