OmniFish, the Estonia-based Jakarta EE consulting company, launched support for Jakarta EE in September 2022 . The support includes JakartaEE 10, GlassFish 7, and Piranha Cloud and its components like Mojarra, a compatible implementation of the Jakarta Faces specification. OmniFish recently also joined the Jakarta EE Working Group as a participant member. InfoQ spoke to Arjan Tijms, David Matějček, and Ondro Mihályi about OmniFish.
InfoQ: What was the inspiration to start this new company?
Arjan Tijms: I have been involved with Java EE and Jakarta EE since 2000. With the release of OmniFaces in 2012 and contributions to Mojarra and JSF (Java Server Faces), I became more involved with specification work and APIs, which culminated in becoming the project lead of several Jakarta EE specifications and Eclipse projects. We set up OmniFish to support this work directly and give customers access to the people who work on many Jakarta EE and Eclipse projects.
David Matějček: Jakarta EE is much more open and happy to accept any help from the community. I can now directly work on Eclipse GlassFish as a committer after 15 years of working with GlassFish and trying to work around the bugs I found. Now I would like to work on GlassFish to improve it for others that use it.
Ondro Mihályi: I strongly envision bringing innovations to the Java industry with Jakarta EE and GlassFish. I was pleased that we shared a similar vision with Arjan and David. We founded OmniFish to be able to pursue it.
InfoQ: Are there any particular Jakarta EE specifications that OmniFish will contribute?
Tijms: Yes, as I'm personally the project lead of the Jakarta Faces and Jakarta Security specifications, those will be the first and foremost ones on my list. With Piranha Cloud, we have implemented a Servlet container from scratch, so we are naturally also interested in the Servlet spec.
Matějček: We are already committers on several specifications, but I would instead do some fixes and maintenance on whichever project requires that. Somebody has to do that when most developers just love creating new stuff!
Mihályi: We certainly plan to contribute to the new Jakarta Config specification. It has a huge potential to become a foundation for many Jakarta EE specifications in the future and make configuration in Jakarta EE easy for users. Besides that, we envision a few improvements for Jakarta Security and Jakarta RESTful Web Services.
InfoQ: What are the long-term goals for OmniFish?
Mihályi: First and foremost, we focus on making our customers successful with the Jakarta EE technology and the Jakarta EE products that we support. We would like to become a trusted and reliable partner, helping companies keep their software fast, reliable, testable, maintainable, and up-to-date. We choose the products we develop and support to provide reliable and flexible options. We aim to match the needs of Jakarta EE users as they evolve and match modern trends, be it microservices, cloud deployments, or serverless solutions.
Ultimately, we would like to establish ourselves as a leading player in the Jakarta EE ecosystem itself; both are furthering the platform and helping customers get the most out of it. We see enormous potential in the cloud, especially in the serverless area. We would like to build products that are widely used and popular for cloud deployments while being ideal also for traditional deployments. Jakarta EE is a perfect foundation for that, as it provides a standard API and allows us to innovate the runtimes under the hood.
InfoQ: What's on the horizon for OmniFish?
Mihályi: The release of Eclipse GlassFish 7 is an important milestone in the short term. We fixed many bugs in it over the last two years and will continue improving it, together with its components such as Mojarra, Soteria, Jersey, and many others.
Further out is getting our new Jakarta EE runtime Piranha Cloud production ready. Piranha Cloud shares many components with GlassFish, but is itself a completely new development. It's fully built up from the ground for embedded, modular and programmatic usage, with short start-up times ideal for cloud and serverless deployments. With GlassFish as a traditional application server, Piranha Cloud as our lightweight runtime, and the Jakarta EE APIs and shared components binding them, we aim to provide a coherent solution for running any backend Java applications.
GlassFish 7 is part of the growing compatible products that support Jakarta EE 10, including Payara Server, WildFly, and more. More details on Jakarta EE 10 release are in this InfoQ news story.
