I had the privilege of speaking at Open Source North last week (June 15th) about the transition from Java EE to Jakarta EE. The conference was well organized, and in its 4th year, was completely sold out weeks earlier. It was exciting to see so many people from the Twin Cities focused on open source!
The presentations were excellent. The presentation “How Much Freedom is too Much?” about Microservices by Kelly Goetsch was packed to the point that there was not even room to stand in the back. It shows how relevant the topic is to folks in the trenches today. I also enjoyed the presentation “WTH is JWT?” by Joel Lord, which was delivered well, and informative.
My presentation was about the transition from Java EE to Jakarta EE. I only had 20 minutes to present, ran over time, and I was ill from a bad breakfast burrito, but it went pretty well. I plan to give an updated version of the presentation at the next JavaMN meeting this month followed by an excellent presentation on Java Microservices by Kevin Sutter.
While the audience had plenty of Java EE practitioners, I was surprised by how little the audience knew about the change from Java EE to Jakarta EE. There is still a lot of work to be done in terms of marketing and in explaining the benefits of moving the platform to Eclipse Foundation. Hopefully, more people will give presentations on the subject and help spread the word.
I do, however, find it a challenge to talk about the future of Jakarta EE because there is still a lot that has not been decided. As the community forms and the projects are established, the people will determine what the future is, and that’s the most important message at this point; that it’s now up to us to set the direction and the pace of innovation for Jakarta EE and that’s a good thing!
