Following its decision to move stewardship of the Java EE technologies to the open-source Eclipse Foundation, creating the EE4J project, Oracle has now joined the Eclipse MicroProfile project.
MicroProfile is a microservice and service mesh/cloud oriented profile of the enterprise Java standards. The overall goal of the project is to define an interoperable microservices platform portable across multiple runtimes. It also seeks to provide an incubation environment for innovative ideas related to microservices and enterprise Java. The main participants in the group are IBM, Red Hat, Tomitribe, Payara, the London Java Community (LJC), SouJava, Hazelcast, Fujitsu, SmartBear and now Oracle.
Project members now include all the creators of the main Java EE application-server platforms (IBM’s Websphere, Red Hat’s JBoss and Oracle’s Glassfish), which has contributed to a lot of speculation if this means that the MicroProfile project will merge with EE4J. This was discussed at length on the MicroProfile Google group and the consensus among the MicroProfile members appears to be that while it might make sense for the projects to merge in some way, sometime in the future, it was currently too early to speculate on this and ultimately it would be up to the community to decide. Many posters expressed concern that amalgamation of the two projects now could slow down the momentum and hamper the agility of the MicroProfile project which in the last quarter of 2017 will see nine releases, including a major point release and the inclusion of Open API.
MicroProfile had been seen as one of the reactions to Oracle’s perceived lack of support for Java EE, however the project website stresses that it arose from a need to move faster than the enterprise Java standards process that existed at the time could keep pace with. A lack of agility was also cited by Oracle in their announcement that they would be moving Java EE to the open-source Eclipse Foundation, where they also stated an intention for 'potential incorporation of Eclipse MicroProfile technologies into the platform'.
If Oracle follows the lead of the other large organisations involved, then joining will mean active participation in the project. Two MicroProfile contributors from Red Hat have accounted for 22.7% of code commits and three from IBM accounted for a further 20%.
MicroProfile version 2.0 is due for release at the end of March 2018.