First year of Eclipse EE4J
The idea of transferring Java EE sources to the Eclipse Foundation was announced at the last Oracle JavaOne conference. The year has passed and in this article I will try to summarize what was done during this year and where we are now.
First of all, I am happy to announce that Eclipse GlassFish RC1 is released!
It’s available for download here. This release is not final. It’s a milestone release with a purpose of indicating progress and providing developers the preview of the final product to play with, test it and provide feedback.
No doubt it’s a platinum trophy for the Jakarta EE community and we expect that Eclipse GlassFish sources will become the basis for an implementation of the Jakarta EE specifications.
It took us a year to achieve it. We transferred projects one by one from Oracle Java EE repositories and it was a challenging process. We had to go through a bunch of approvals on Oracle and Eclipse side. You can read more about it here.
There are currently 39 projects created and 88 repositories transferred. I collected the information about when project sources were transferred on the picture below.
As you see we started with EclipseLink and Yasson, which were already at Eclipse Foundation, but under RT project. The first projects which were transferred from Oracle GitHub were JSONP, JMS, WebSocket and OpenMQ. It was done in January 2018. GlassFish repository and CTS/TCK repositories were transferred in Sep 2018.
Most of projects have the EPL 2.0 license, but some of them were transferred under the more permissive EDL license. This is true for projects that shared their codebase with the JDK in the past, such as JAXB and JAX-WS.
Now I would like to provide you some vision about the volume of work done. Let’s take a look at the Java EE codebase. Some projects (like most of the API projects) are relatively small. Implementations are usually much bigger and the TCK codebase is huge.
To be more precise, Java EE source-code contains over 5.5 million lines of code and over 2.2 million lines of comments in more than 61,000 files. For comparison, it’s around the same as the server side of World of Warcraft and the Linux Kernel 2.6.0.
CTS/TCK contains over 4.6 million lines of code and over 1.1 million lines of comments in more than 34,000 files. It’s comparable with the codebase of Windows NT 3.1 and Photoshop CS6.
In total we transferred 13.5 million lines of code in 95k files.
It’s worth mentioning that TCK/CTS sources were closed. It’s the first time the community has seen it and started contributing.
A lot of work is done, but there are still things to do. Here is a current status of projects from Eclipse EE4J web site:
The above graph charts the following progress:
- 20% Project Proposal has been posted for community review
- 40% Project committers and resources have been provisioned
- 60% Initial Contribution provided to the Eclipse IP Team
- 80% Initial Contribution Pushed to Git Repository
- 100% Project has engaged in its first Release Review
Not all projects are at 100% yet. Most of the projects are still need to pass the release reviews and release the first Eclipse version. This work is in progress and it goes well so far. The community is highly involved. I counted people having more than 5 commits/bug reports and there are more than 80 active contributors from different vendors including Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Payara, Tomitribe and others.
I created two pie-charts demonstrating how different vendors are participating in EE4J projects.
The first chart is demonstrating committers per organization. It represents 213 committers in total. If the employer of the person is not defined, they were assigned to At Large group.
The second chart demonstrated project leads by organization.
In order to achieve our goals the activity and participation levels must be kept high. The main goal currently is completing Java EE 8 certification and releasing the final version of Eclipse GlassFish.
The following is the current schedule:
Sep 21 — All code required for GF build contributed.
Sep 23 — Eclipse GlassFish builds.
Oct 1 — Java EE 8 CTS testing. Running CTS tests on Eclipse GlassFish.
Oct 22 — Eclipse GlassFish 5.1-RC1 milestone release.
Oct 29 — CI/CD release pipelines completed.
Nov 5 — Dependencies updated. All projects are released to OSSRH and have dependencies to Eclipse version of other components.
Nov 30 — Release Review completed.
Dec 14 — Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 release. All CTS tests are passed.
So far we are on schedule. We need to keep up the cadence and make a final push to release the final version of Eclipse GlassFish on Dec 14, 2018.
At the end of the article I would like to say thanks to the community and vendor support Jakarta EE has received. While Oracle is making the bulk of contribution effort, it will take a community to continue evolving and enhancing Jakarta EE. In addition to Oracle, this release will be delivered with assistance from Payara, Tomitribe, Red Hat, IBM, and various independent community members. We are very pleased to see this community come together and we look forward to further growth in the coming months.
Also, I would like to use this opportunity and invite people to participate in Jakarta EE efforts. This is the interesting time, don’t miss it!
