At the end of 2017, Oracle announced the donation of Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. Initially, the project was named Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J). After a survey taken by the community, the name of Java EE was changed, in order to avoid legal problems due to the fact that Oracle owns the trademark for the name Java, to Jakarta Enterprise Edition (Jakarta EE)—the entry point for the new platform is Java EE 8.
Under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation community, and with the commitment of the major vendors, the Enterprise Edition platform could start a new life in order to accelerate the adoption for the implementation of business applications for a cloud-native world.
The migration of all source code to Jakarta EE is proceeding quickly but, in the meantime, the evolution of the cloud environment and microservices require immediate answers in terms of standards and implementation models.
For this reason, Eclipse MicroProfile was created, as it's meant to optimize Enterprise Java for a microservice architecture. MicroProfile is aimed at spurring innovation that may result in future as a standard, but at the moment requires a faster rate of change than the intentionally measured pace of a standard process.
The expectation is that the existing Eclipse MicroProfile community and other open source communities should continue leading the way. Jakarta EE will incorporate Java innovations from these projects and communities into new versions in order to have complete and strong standards.
The following screenshot shows the history of Java EE releases, in terms of versions and the time duration between each of them, in months:
As you can see, the intervals between releases keep getting longer, and the last release version, which is Java EE 8, came out after 52 months!
In the next section, we will analyze the details of the latest OpenJDK versions, 9 and 10, and the Java EE 8 platform. These represent the base on which Eclipse MicroProfile is found, which is the Java Enterprise proposal for the realization of microservice architectures in cloud environments.