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Tag: Jakarta

  • Eclipse Foundation Formally Releases Jakarta EE 9 Spec

    Eclipse Foundation Formally Releases Jakarta EE 9 Spec

    The post-Java Enterprise Edition (EE) era has formally begun with the release of a long-awaited Jakarta EE 9 Platform and Web Profile specification from the Eclipse Foundation.

    In addition, the Eclipse Foundation has announced that version 6.0.0 of the open source Glassfish application server has now been certified to be compliant with Jakarta EE 9.

    Functionally equivalent to the existing Java EE 8 specification, the release of a Jakarta EE 9 Platform and Web Profile specification is intended to enable IT vendors that have built offerings based on Java to shift their naming conventions to Jakarta EE 9.

    Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said now that the Jakarta EE 9 specification is in place IT organizations should expect to see the members of the Eclipse Foundation that contribute to the project begin working more aggressively on a Jakarta EE 10 specification that adds more features.

    Under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation, Milinkovich added there will be a lot more focus on developing a truly cloud-native implementation of Java EE as work on the next generation of Jakarta EE platform advances.

    The rate at which new capabilities were being added to Java under the stewardship of Oracle had become an issue given the rate at which other programming languages are being advanced. Oracle agreed to relinquish control of the Java specification to the Eclipse Foundation, which in theory should lead to a faster rate of innovation as more contributors participate in an open source project.

    However, Oracle insisted on retaining the rights to the Java trademark because it has support contracts in place for existing instances of Java that provide a significant stream of revenue. Providers of rival platforms based on Java are hoping enterprise IT organizations will shift quickly to Jakarta as part of a way to reduce their support costs at a time when IT teams are under intense pressure to reduce the total cost of IT.

    Despite the rise of a wide range of programming languages in recent years, Java is still widely employed with most enterprise IT organizations, many of whom have been using Java since it was first made available by Sun Microsystems. Reliance on Java is not likely to significantly decline anytime soon; however, most IT organizations are now making greater use of additional programming languages alongside Java. In fact, many of the applications that DevOps teams are building and deploying are made up of modules that were built using different programming languages.

    It may still be a while before a Jakarta EE platform is pervasively employed in IT environments. However, it’s clear a new era that should result in advances that make it easier to deploy applications that are compatible with Java faster has arrived. How those capabilities will manifest themselves may still be unclear, but the fact that they are being worked on should be a comfort to IT organizations that have already invested millions of dollars in training developers how to build Java applications optimally.

  • Eclipse Foundation Touts Jakarta Progress

    Eclipse Foundation Touts Jakarta Progress

    The Eclipse Foundation today published the results of survey of 2,180 software developers that finds over half of respondents (55%) have adopted Java/Jakarta EE 8.

    In addition, the Eclipse Foundation is making available an update to the Jakarta Enterprise Edition (EE) specification that will move away from the javax namespace to embrace jakarta namespaces for all components.

    Jakarta EE 8 is essentially Java EE 8, which Oracle agreed would become open source software when it transferred ownership last year to the Eclipse Foundation. The transition from Java EE to Jakarta nomenclature remains a work in process.

    The Eclipse Foundation finds the use of Java technologies is in a state of flux across the board. For example, adoption of Java 11 now stands at 28%, while Java 14 adoption is at 11%, according to the survey. That compares to 64% that are still employing Java 8.

    Spring/Spring Boot at 44% adoption continues to be the leading framework for building cloud-native applications, compared to 35% using Jakarta EE and 16% for Red Hat Quarkus, a framework that runs natively on Kubernetes.

    Usage of Eclipse Che, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for building applications on Kubernetes, now stands at 11%, the survey also finds.

    Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said it’s clear organizations are now employing multiple frameworks to build Java applications, given a 13% drop in reliance on Spring/Spring Boot from last year’s survey results.

    However, the survey also finds that overall, the use of Java to build microservice applications has declined to 39% from 43% during the same period. That drop may reflect both the complexity of building microservices-based applications, given the fact that 25% of survey respondents said they are using Java to build monolithic applications, said Milinkovich.

    At the same time, some organizations may be opting to lift and shift existing monolithic Java applications into the cloud in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, noting once redeployed, those organizations may then opt to modernize those applications using microservices.

    With access to many local data centers limited during the pandemic, many organizations may have decided the most prudent option was to lift and shift Java applications as they are than re-engineer them first, he added.

    There are currently 12 frameworks officially that are compatible with Jakarta EE 8, which Milinkovich said is indicative of the continued relevance of Java technologies for building applications both inside and out of the cloud. Now that Java is available as open source software, the level of innovation surrounding Java platforms will also accelerate, he said.

    There is still a large base of developers that rely on Java and by extension Jakarta to build enterprise applications. However, IT organizations now routinely employ a wide range of programming languages and platforms to build applications. Java is still the most dominant when it comes to building backend applications; however, many organizations are still evaluating their options when it comes to building cloud-native applications on platforms such as Kubernetes.

    Java in all its forms will, of course, be around for a long time to come. The only real question is how much organizations will continue to rely on it, in an IT world that continues to transform.

  • Pivotal Software Embraces OpenJDK

    Pivotal Software Embraces OpenJDK

    Pivotal Software has officially thrown its weight behind OpenJDK, the open source version of the standard edition of Java, by adding support for OpenJDK to the Pivotal Spring Runtime on its Spring framework.

    At the same time, Pivotal announced it is extending its commercial support for open source Apache Tomcat servers in addition to providing commercial support for all the major open source Spring projects, including Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Spring Cloud Dataflow.

    Since 2011, Oracle, IBM and SAP have been making a case for employing OpenJDK. Ryan Morgan, vice president of engineering for the application platform at Pivotal, said that while other languages have become increasingly popular, the primary workhorse for building back-end applications in the enterprise remains Java. Now that Oracle has formally relinquished control over Java source code to The Eclipse Foundation, research and development into the legacy programming environment should accelerate. Oracle retains licensing rights to the name Java, but versions 8 and higher of Java Enterprise Edition are being converted to an open source platform known as Jakarta.

    Morgan said much of the work going forward would be focused on modernizing monolithic Java applications to make it either to turn them into microservices or at least make it easier for microservices developed in other languages to make calls via application programming interfaces (APIs) to those back-end applications. As enterprise IT organizations make the shift, they increasingly will rely on DevOps processes to manage the transition. The effort should accelerate the extent to which many organizations will need to rely on modern best DevOps practices.

    As both OpenJDK and Jakarta continue to move forward, Morgan said Pivotal is committed to continuing investment in the Spring framework, which has done much to make developing Java applications a much more agile endeavor. The most immediate benefit, of course, is the reduction of licensing fees associated with employing Java platforms. Many IT organizations that have mandated open source code-first and adopted alternative programming languages now may want to reconsider their options, especially when the number of developers who know how to write applications in more modern languages is comparatively small.

    Of course, it will take many years for enterprise IT organizations to fully make this transition. In the meantime, many of them will continue developing applications in Java simply because they have large teams that have mastered a programming construct that has been in place for three decades or more. Many of those same organizations may be making greater use of rival programming constructs, but Java and its descendants will play a major role in the enterprise well into the next decade. The primary challenge Pivotal will face is maintaining dominance of the frameworks employed to build new applications based on Jakarta and OpenJDK, in addition to updated existing Java applications.

    — Mike Vizard