Exploring Jakarta EE 9
Jakarta EE 9, scheduled for release on November 20, 2020, is the second formal release since the launch of Jakarta EE two years ago. This release follows up on last year’s Jakarta EE 8. The primary objective of the Jakarta EE 9 release is to deliver a set of specifications that are functionally similar to Jakarta EE 8, but in the Jakarta EE 9 namespace jakarta.*.
Changes in Jakarta EE 9
With the first milestone release of Jakarta EE 9 back on June 23, 2020, we saw a major update to the naming used in the Jakarta EE namespace to jakarta.*. This will lead to a great need for updates amongst all major frameworks and application servers to this new naming. We will see many technologies update over the next year gradually to support this. This has minimal impact on what Jakarta EE provides overall, but will result in Jakarta vendors throughout the world updating their toolsets.
Migration to Jakarta EE 9
Users will begin to be forced to start transitioning technology to Jakarta EE 9 eventually. Due to the fact that there is no real functionality updates from Java EE 8 and Jakarta EE 9, many development teams will not transition quickly into Jakarta EE 9.
The aspect that will begin to bring users to Jakarta EE 9 is when vendors for different framework or application server eventually begin to transition to Jakarta EE 9. This will result in more of a community transition to Jakarta EE 9. This will happen in a number of different technologies through 2021.
Currently you can find Glassfish 6 (https://eclipse-ee4j.github.io/glassfish/download) with support for Jakarta EE 9, with integrations coming in Tomcat 10 (https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-10.0-doc/index.html), Jetty 11 (https://webtide.com/renaming-from-javax-to-jakarta/), and Wildfly 22.
Future Direction of Jakarta EE Platform
With all the updates and changes that are being made in the Jakarta EE 9 environment, you should expect a continual discussion around them mainly due to the effect that it has on all tooling options that support Jakarta EE 9 and any future versions. While the actual functionality updates were minimal with the release of Jakarta EE 9, the community impact is quite significant. We look forward to continuing to see how this most recent update to Jakarta EE 9 will impact the Java community.
This being said, you will be seeing a number of updates to the Jakarta EE platform which will likely start to see more substantial updates to the technology. Many will be wondering if they should update to Jakarta EE 9. The reality is that every product team will eventually want to make this update, but it will be increasingly expensive to upgrade as Jakarta EE becomes more rich in feature set.
Additional Resources
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