Last year, we announced Apache TomEE as a certified Jakarta EE 9.1 server (See blog post). The season favors gifts and good news, so I thought I would write this small blog to talk about our journey to being MicroProfile 5.0 certified.
A while back, Apache TomEE started implementing MicroProfile. At that time, we were contributing to Apache Geronimo implementations for various specifications: config, openapi, opentracing, metrics, health and fault-tolerance. We had our own JWT implementation with additional integration features than what the MicroProfile JWT specification supports. Back then, we were passing the TCK for the MicroProfile 2.1, released October 2018.
Many years passed, and because we had a lot of requests to upgrade to the more recent MicroProfile release, we decided to invest and implement MicroProfile 5.0.
From Geronimo to SmallRye
There aren’t many MicroProfile components implementations out there. In the beginning, there were some providers, like Apache Geronimo, KumuluzEE, SmallRye, Apache CXF, Apache TomEE, Helidon, Glassfish, OpenLiberty and probably more. Nowadays, the list gets thinner. From a diversity, competition, and innovation point of view, it’s not ideal, but we had to catch up with 5 Jakarta EE versions and the same gap to fill with MicroProfile. We decided to abandon Apache Geronimo MicroProfile components and favor SmallRye implementations.
After redoing the entire integration to get rid of Apache Geronimo and integrate SmallRye, I’m pleased to announce that we are a fully MicroProfile 5.0 implementation. We still run our own JWT implementation, and we also use CXF for the Rest Client implementation.
MicroProfile 6.0 is still not available when I’m writing this blog post, and anyways, the requirements seem to make it not compatible with Jakarta EE 9.1 and, therefore, Apache TomEE 9. We are closely following the discussion, and we will undoubtedly provide full MicroProfile 6.0 support in Apache TomEE 10 and with Jakarta EE 10.
Congratulations on another Milestone. I understand reason behind(Resource constraint and Geronimo is not much active to catch up with recent MP releases) switch to SmallRye implementation. I remember reading in mailing list that Apache Geronimo might pulled into TomEE and enhance the MP impl. Is that still in cards? Because Apache TomEE is the only server used to have all Apache implementation for Jakarta EE/MP components. It has that unique proposition when compare to other implementations.