Last September, Oracle announced, with the support of IBM and Red Hat that Java EE was going to move to the Eclipse Foundation. Since then, some other important companies have joined the initiative with strategic or participating-level commitments.

Following are the members involved in the Jakarta EE project:

• Strategic members:
  • Fujitsu
  • IBM
  • Oracle
  • Payara
  • Red Hat
  • Tomitribe

• Participating members:
  • CloudBees
  • DocDoku
  • Genuitec
  • IncQuery Labs
  • Lightbend
  • Microsoft
  • Mizuho
  • Pivotal
  • RCP Vision
  • SAP
  • UseOpen
  • Vaadin
  • Webtide

The community requires that the Jakarta EE platform evolve faster than Java EE—to continue to be a reference platform for cloud architectures and microservices, which evolve rapidly, it is necessary to quickly incorporate into new versions of the platform the new features coming from open source communities, such as Eclipse MicroProfile.

Jakarta EE should make developers able to build cloud-native and mission-critical applications using the decades of developer experience built that Java EE was built upon.

The migration process from Java EE to Jakarta EE is complex, but, despite everything, it is proceeding relatively quickly.

After dealing with all the legal aspects related to the use of the name Java and javax within the specifications, it started the phase of migration of projects, specifications, and reference implementations to the Eclipse Foundation repositories.

This process requires a lot of effort because there are approximately 110 repositories to transfer. You can find the complete list with the project statuses here https://dmitrykornilov.net/2018/05/09/jakarta-ee-projects-summary/.

The community is performing the following activities:

• Internal license checking in order to make sure licenses are correct.
• Internal third-party analysis in order to identify what dependencies should be replaced with their latest versions to fix major bugs and security issues.
• Renaming the original projects with the following scheme:
  • Eclipse Project for XXX for API projects
  • Eclipse XXX for implementation projects
• Issuing transfers in order to preserve issue numbers and history without losing the previous job.
• Building environments in order to create the infrastructure needed to compile and run, in an agile continuous-integration way, the projects that make up the Jakarta EE platform.
• Aligning the previous projects' repositories in order to set a message that communicates that the project has been transferred to the Eclipse Foundation.

The base version for the final first release of Jakarta EE is Java EE 8.

At the end of the process, we will have a platform that will make all actors (vendors, Java communities, individuals, and so on) able to interact as peers with no one vendor holding, as in the spirit of the open source model.

So, with the power of the open source model, expressed in Jakarta EE and MicroProfile, do you think Java can still be a major player in the cloud and microservice world?

In my opinion, the answer is yes, and throughout the rest of the book, we will see together how to maximize the potential of Java and of the PaaS to create microservices in distributed environments.