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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.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #7

Welcome to the seventh issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

One of the most common questions I get when talking about Jakarta EE is: “How can I help?”. Well, here is a suggestion: The post “Help wanted: improved signature test tool” by Bill Shannon on the Jakarta EE Community mailing list asks for help improving the signature test tool used by the TCK.

In short, what we need help with is to fix the features of this tool to make it possible to either limit the recorded signatures to the API being tested or exclude the signatures for the JDK classes. See the GitHub issue for details.

MicroProfile will produce specs and it is up to others how they adopt or consume them

This week’s MicroProfile Hangout was dedicated to Working Group discussions. The agenda was, as always, set by the participants and the topic this week quickly became technical alignment between MicroProfile and related technologies, such as Jakarta EE. The result of this discussion is summarized by John Clingan in the thread MicroProfile Working Group discussion – Push vs pull on the MicroProfile mailing list. Basically, what this approach means is that MicroProfile will produce specs and it is up to others how they adopt or consume them.

There is an interesting Twitter discussion going on around Quarkus, CDI and the requirements to claim MicroProfile compatibility. This discussion has moved over to various threads on the MicroProfile mailing list. The disagreement within the MicroProfile community is whether the Java EE specifications (JAX-RS, JSON-B, JSON-P, and CDI) are a part of MicroProfile or just referenced APIs. Why this distinction is important is worth a blog post on its own, but the gist of it is that if CDI is a part of the platform, a product cannot be claimed to be compatible with MicroProfile unless the CDI TCK is passed.

For reference, I have included the graphics describing the content of the first (1.0) and the current (3.2) release of MicroProfile below.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #6

Welcome to the sixth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

On the fun side, I was made aware that my shoutout for the Hashtag series may be a little confusing as you can see in my conversation with Ronnie Zolverda.

I didn’t want to use #5 to indicate number 5 since Twitter would then interpret the hashtag (#) as if I were tagging the number 5. Also interesting that nobody reacted on the first 4 posts…

From this week on, I will tweet that “Hashtag Jakarta EE number X is out!” to avoid confusion in the future 🙂

So, over to the technical side. Gunnar Morling referred me to a recent article of his where he describes how to use the JDK Flight Recorder to monitor REST APIs.

We didn’t have any Jakarta Tech Talks or Update calls this week, but the work with Jakarta EE 9 proceeds as planned. The status is best followed by checking out the project board. We have now passed the deadline for individual component release plans. These are Java Activation Framework 2.0 and Jakarta Enterprise Beans 4.0. The rest will follow the release plan for the full platform.

The discussions regarding establishing a working group for MicroProfile, mentioned in Hashtag Jakarta EE #1 and #3, continue with weekly MicroProfile hangouts as well as being a recurring topic in the Jakarta EE Steering Committee.

So far, there are two proposals on the table; a joint working group or two separate working groups. While the structure of the working group(s) is important, another aspect is the technical alignment of Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. A couple of weeks ago David Belvins put forward a couple of proposals to bootstrap the discussions. A third proposal was presented by Steve Millidge where he proposes that profiles in Jakarta EE are promoted to individual brands and that MicroProfile becomes a profile of Jakarta EE. Interesting thoughts!

Reflect, Relax, Recharge at Devnexus 2020

The next conference I will be attending is Devnexus in Atlanta which is organized by the Atlanta Java User Group.

This year, Devnexus is extended with a JUG Leader Summit scheduled the day before the conference where there will be more than 40 Java User Groups represented.

In my session, What’s going on with Jakarta EE, I will provide an update about the ongoing work with Jakarta EE 9. This talk is also an opportunity to come forward and have a dialogue about everything going on in and around the Jakarta EE Working Group at the Eclipse Foundation.

During the conference, you will probably find me around the Jakarta EE booth with Tanja when I am not attending talks by all the amazing speakers. Please visit ut there for an informal chat about open source or to pick up some of our Jakarta EE swag!

Hashtag Jakarta EE #5

Welcome to the fifth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This weekend, I attended my first FOSDEM. This is a free event that takes place in Brussels every year. It is quite an experience with fully packed rooms and crowded corridors. Sessions are short (25 mins) and focused. Absolutely a recommendation!

Mike Milinkovich presented Free at Last! The Tale of Jakarta EE for a full Java Dev Room.

Check out the minutes from the weekly Jakarta EE Platform call to follow the progress of Jakarta EE 9.

Earlier this week, I presented Microservices in Practice with Eclipse MicroProfile at Javaforum Malmö.

This demo-heavy talk was well received. There has been a steady increase of participants in our JUG over the last year, a strong indication for the continued popularity of Java.

If you have made it this far, I want to end this hashtag with an encouragement to check out these articles by Nicolas Frankel. He provides some very useful tips and advice about Tricky Servlet Mappings and Creative use of Filters.

Contributing to Jakarta EE

This post is meant to clear up some misunderstandings that occurred during a discussion thread on the Jakarta EE Community mailing list. Some of this is a repetition of what I described in Jakarta EE 9 Shaping Up in December, but such an important topic cannot be stressed enough.

The only thing you need in order to contribute to Jakarta EE specifications is a signed ECA!

First of all, to contribute to any open source project at the Eclipse Foundation, you will need to create an account and sign the Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA). See below for a visualization of this process.

Steps to create an Eclipse Account

That’s it!

You can now start contributing by submitting Pull Requests to the projects you are interested in, including Jakarta EE specification projects. It doesn’t cost anything. No signatures from your employer are necessary. Just the ECA. The only thing you need in order to contribute to Jakarta EE specifications is a signed ECA!

The more you contribute, the more likely it is that you will be proposed to become a committer to the project. I will describe the zero-cost way of becoming a committer in a follow-up post to this one.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #4

Welcome to the fourth issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

We’re on a roll here! I can’t believe it is already four weeks since I started this series!

Stay tuned for announcements about Jakarta MVC!

A little on the side of Jakarta EE, but still related is that the MVC 1.0 specification (JSR 371) is finally final! We have been working with this for a long time, and special thanks to Christian for his work in getting the release out the door! Without him, I doubt there would be a release of MVC!

So, why isn’t MVC already moved over to the Eclipse Foundation and Jakarta EE? The short answer to that is that we wanted to finish the first release under the JCP in order to have a released project to transfer. We have already transferred Krazo, the reference implementation and the plan is to start the transfer of the specification and the TCK shortly. Stay tuned for announcements about Jakarta MVC!

Jakarta EE 9 is moving forward with great progress. The status of all the work is tracked on the Jakarta EE 9 tracking board. If you are involved in one of the specifications in the Plan Review column, you are encouraged to take a look and see how you can help move these specifications forward to the In Progress column. Instructions can be found in notes at the top of the columns.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #3

Welcome to the third issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Most of this week was spent at the Eclipse Foundation office in Ottawa. It is great to have the opportunity to meet the people I work with daily in person once in a while.

On Tuesday, January 14, there was an off-week MicroProfile Hangout dedicated to the discussions around the Working Group proposals for MicroProfile. The hangout was pretty well attended with the usual suspects doing most of the talking. See the presentation and meeting minutes for more details. The session was even recorded.

This week, we also had a Jakarta Tech talk by Adam Bien. He gave a great presentation about Jakarta EE application servers and Docker.

We even had a Jakarta EE Community Update Call where we talked about Jakarta EE 9, the Jakartification of the specification documents as well as the 2020 program and budget.

In the blog space, there is a lot being written about Jakarta EE. I will point to a couple of posts here. Will Lyons summarises The Jakarta EE 8 Community Retrospective and you can read about the approval of the Jakarta EE 9 release plan in Mike Milinkovich’ post Moving Forward with Jakarta EE 9,

Hashtag Jakarta EE #2

Welcome to the second issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I have been in Sandusky, Ohio for CodeMash. This awesome conference is organized by an Ohio Non-Profit Organization and is held at the Kalahari resort in Sandusky, Ohio.

In addition to meeting a bunch of awesome people, I had a talk about Eclipse MicroProfile.

Attending conferences like CodeMash that are not entirely Java-centric is a great reminder that outside our bubble, most developers haven’t heard about Jakarta EE or MicroProfile at all!

It is both challenging and rewarding to give a talk where you are not preaching to the choir. I encourage you all to do this more often. This is how we spread the message! This is how we grow our community!

In the Jakarta EE space, we started the week with an EE4J PMC meeting followed by the Jakarta EE Steering- and Specification committees. The most important agenda item discussed is the ongoing ballot for approval of the Jakarta EE 9 release plan in the Specification Committee. You can follow the ongoing ballot on the Jakarta EE Specification Committee mailing list.

At the end of last year, the Java EE Guardians completed their rebranding to become the Jakarta EE Ambassadors. I am really happy that I was able to help in the process of getting the new logo created. This is the first approved usage of the Jakarta EE brand and logo outside of the Jakarta EE Working Group. A milestone in itself!

Hashtag Jakarta EE #1

For a while now, I have been thinking of posting more regular updates about stuff going on in the Jakarta EE community. Kind of what Josh Long does with his “This Week in Spring” series. Being a big fan of Josh and the work he is doing in the community, I am not ashamed of copying him.

The goal is weekly updates, but being realistic I leave out the cadence from the title. So welcome to the first issue of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

The year 2020 is still young and pristine, most members enjoying a well-deserved vacation after a busy 2019.

Worth mentioning, though, is the ongoing discussion regarding the establishment of a Working Group for MicroProfile. There are currently two proposals on the table, the MicroProfile Working Group Proposal and the Cloud Native for Java Working Group Proposal.

At the end of last year, a release plan for Jakarta EE 9 was made available by the Jakarta EE Platform Project. The work with this release will start up again next week with weekly calls. These calls are open for anyone. The details can be found in the EE4J PMC Calendar.

Hope you enjoyed this short update!