Welcome to Jakarta EE
What is Jakarta EE
Jakarta EE is the new name for Java EE as it is maintained by Eclipse foundation now. The Git repo for Jakarta EE is github.com/eclipse-ee4j and
the project portal is https://jakarta.ee/.
Brief History
Java EE was maintained by Oracle under the Java Community Process.
On September 12, 2017, Oracle announced that it would submit Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation and hence the birth of Jakarta EE
Once it was handed over to Eclipse foundation couple of important things happend due to the “Java” and “javax” trademark.
- Java EE platform got renamed to Jakarta EE
- Many of the specification were renamed (Java ->Jakarta)
For instance JAX-RS is renamed Jakarta RESTful Web Services - Git repo for Java EE moved from github.com/javaee to github.com/eclipse-ee4j and all the current development is happening in the later one.
- javax.* package name renamed to jakarta.*
For instance the JAX-RS related classes were in javax.ws.rs which is now renamed to package jakarta.ws.rs. - Many of the XML names spaces are also changed to update with
(java->jakarta) - Published artifacts in maven repository also changed.
Jakarta EE 8 is the first release under the eclipse foundation, it is more of transfering artifacts from old repo to new repo Jakarta EE 9 is a humongous release which contains major code changes including package renaming.
Road Ahead: Adopting Jakarta
Upgrading to Jakarta EE from previous versions of Java EE could be little tricky as pointed bellow
- Code changes needed to reflect new name spaces.
- Build script also needed to be changed to get artifacts with new name.
- Not all the the application servers support Jakarta EE yet, as of this writing
GlashFish 6.1, Apache TomEE 9.0 and WildFly 23 are some of the compitable products. Full list can be found here.
Nevertheless Jakarta EE is the future and we will see more adoption of Jakarta EE over time.
