After Oracle expressed its desire that Java EE be rebranded as part of the project’s transfer to Eclipse, the community has voted, and the new name for Java EE going forward will be Jakarta EE. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, wrote in a blog post that almost 7,000 people voted in the community poll, with over 64% choosing “Jakarta EE” in preference to the alternative “Enterprise Profile”.
David Blevins, Founder, and CEO of Tomitribe authored a blog post in early February with his thoughts and how he came around to liking the Jakarta EE name, having initially been unsure. You might remember the Apache Jakarta project that brought many Java open source tools to fruition including Ant, Commons, Maven, POI, Struts, and Tomcat. Apache owns the Jakarta name but has retired it from use, and has now agreed to transfer the name to Eclipse, which will allow it to be trademarked. As Blevins states,
“Jakarta then becomes a brand that symbolizes more than 20 years of shared investment, contribution and leadership by two major open source organizations.
Could you ask for a more symbolically beautiful start to our future of open source Java EE?
Java was built by companies. Jakarta was built by community-run open source foundations working together. A transition of Java EE to Jakarta EE symbolizes a move from commercial to open source not just in practice, but in name as well.”
In addition, Jakarta EE naturally shortens to “JEE” (or even “EE”) and jakarta.servlet.http looks pretty similar to javax.servlet.http.
As part of the transfer of the Java EE projects to the Eclipse Foundation Application Server Glassfish is also being renamed to Eclipse Glassfish, and a working group will run Jakarta EE outside of the Java Community Process called the EE.next Working Group.
EE4J: What’s Next?
Java EE is still in the process of migrating to the Eclipse Foundation. With the new name established, the next short-term objective is for the EE4J project to ship a Java EE 8-compliant release as quickly as possible, with Milinkovich suggesting that “creating an ecosystem of developers and companies using this code is important, and the sooner we start the better.”
Work is ongoing to transfer the vast amounts of code from the existing Oracle-led Java EE organization on GitHub into the EE4J project at Eclipse. David Delabassee, Software Evangelist at Oracle, provided an EE4J Update a few weeks ago, stating that Oracle has contributed source for the following projects:
- Eclipse Grizzly
- Eclipse OpenMQ
- Eclipse Project for JAX-RS
- Eclipse Project for JMS
- Eclipse Tyrus
- Eclipse Project for WebSocket
- Eclipse Project for JSON Processing
Delabassee notes that Eclipse Yasson and EclipseLink projects have been transferred to EE4J as well. Eclipse Jersey and Eclipse Mojarra are currently being worked on.
You can watch, star, and send pull requests to all of the EE4J projects on GitHub at https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j.