Hashtag Jakarta EE #322

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-two of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I was in Montreal for ConFoo. The conference season is over us, and already next week, I will be in Atlanta for Devnexus. At Devnexus, I will be managing the Jakarta EE booth in addition to speaking and attending the JUG Leader’s Summit and the Java Champions Summit. Devnexus is the premier Java conference in the US. I am looking so much forward to meeting old and new friends there.

Last week, I wrote Will AI Kill Open Source? While writing it, I decided that it is probably going to be enough material for several posts, turning it into a blog series. Stay tuned for the next post in the series.

Finally, it seems like the topic of AI is popping op on the agenda of the Jakarta EE Platform call again. When I started bringing it up about a year ago, there was a fair amount of skepticism so I am happy to see that it was discussed in last week’s call even if I wasn’t present. Things are moving so fast these days and it is important to position Jakarta EE in all of this. Maybe a start could be to create an opinionated MCP server for Jakarta EE. Or maybe a SkillsJar for Jakarta EE? We won’t know unless we discuss it. By the way, SkillsJars is a project by James Ward where skills for agents are packaged as JARs and distributed via Maven Central. I will definitely write more about it in a later post.

ConFoo 2026

This was my fifth time speaking at ConFoo in Montreal. This year, there were around 800 attendees, which brings them close to the peak years before the pandemic. I am happy to see and experience the vibrant developer community in Montreal. The conference was originally a PHP conference, but now covers multiple languages and technologies. Of course, the ever present topic of AI was prevalent here as well this year. I had some very interesting discussions with Kito Mann and Andrew Lombardi among others.

Amazon offered 500 free credits for Kiro at their booth, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. Kiro offers spec-driven development, and it provided comprehensive high- and low-level designs, requirements, and associated tasks to implement them. First, I prompted it to create an MCP server for Jakarta EE. After about 200 credits, it delivered something. I am not sure if it is actually what I asked for, but it was pretty impressive.

My second try is still running. I gave it the task of providing an implementation of Jakarta Data 1.1 that will work with Apache OpenJPA and passes the TCK. It will be extremely interesting to see how this goes. I will write about it in the blog series about AI and Open Source that I started last week.

My first talk was The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. It is a good talk and usually gets positive reactions from the attendees. This was no exception. The feedback that was given on the analog paper feedback forms were very good.

The next day, I presented What Spring Developers Should Know About Jakarta EE. This is also a good talk, even if I am not as comfortable with it as the previous one. However, it was extremely well liked and got even better reviews from the attendees. I ran a little out of time at the end as the sessions at ConFoo are 45 minutes, so I am actually looking forward to giving it next week at Devnexus where I will have 60 minutes to my disposal.

On the last day, I had the pleasure of meeting Bazlur. As he pointed out in his post on X, ConFoo is where we meet up every other year when we both are speaking there. Always nice to meet our good community members in person.

Will AI Kill Open Source?

Will AI kill Open Source? Is it already happening? Or is this just another clickbait title? Well, let’s see. First of all, I am writing this by hand without the help of any artificial intelligence. There is only human intelligence involved here. I will leave it up to you to judge the quality of it, but at least it is real.

I don’t think AI will kill Open Source. It is not about it not being capable of it. I think it is more that we are not going to allow it to happen. Why should we suddenly abandon all practices of reuse and use of proven implementations and libraries over reinventing the wheel ourselves? Why would we let AI rewrite algorithms and functionality that are already implemented in open source projects, verified, and proven to work? That’s where human intelligence comes in. Abandoning all sound practices of software engineering just because we suddenly have a new developer-kid-on-the-block that can vomit out code faster than any human in history? I don’t think so.

After all, human intelligence is human

After all, human intelligence is human. We know that we sometimes make mistakes. AI doesn’t. AI is never wrong unless a human points out that it is. How does this relate to open source again? What if we didn’t have to point out to the AI that it was wrong? What if we got the AI to use components and building blocks from open source libraries and APIs that are verified to be correct? Isn’t that the strength of open source? That multiple human brains have been involved in creating it in collaboration. So, in order to feed the AI with secure, stable, correct building blocks, we need open source.

If there is one thing AI is good at, it is following specifications. Maybe implementations can be generated by AI if the specifications are well-defined enough. Especially if the specifications come with a comprehensive test suite to verify that an implementation implements it correctly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a set of high-quality, widely adopted, interoperable specifications with associated test suites?

Luckily, we do! And that is what Jakarta EE is all about. I will elaborate more on this in future posts. I see that this post is starting to get a little long, so it may be that this will be the first in a series of posts on this topic.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #321

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-one of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

As this post comes out, I have just arrived home from DeveloperWeek 2026 in San Jose, California. I will now spend a couple of days at home before going to Montreal for ConFoo 2026. I look forward to presenting at this conference for the fifth time.

When drifting just a little outside the sphere of Java-focused conference, it is very apparent that Java is perceived as being a legacy language. Most of these developers (or do they identify as vibe-prompters these days?) are not aware of the progress made by Java to make it the number one platform for AI workloads. The performance of the JVM alone should be convincing enough, but these days when quality is measured by quantity (in lines of code), it is easy to forget the fundamentals of software architecture.

Bruno Borges has put together a bunch of patterns that showcases how modern Java differs from the old style, including how Enterprise Java has evolved from the old J2EE to modern Jakarta EE.

In the minutes from last week’s Jakarta EE Platform call, the content for Jakarta EE 12 Milestone 3 is outlined. All specifications are expected to update their parent pom.xml to the newly released EE4J Parent 2.0.0 which contains the configuration needed to be able to stage artifacts before releasing to Maven Central the same way we used to be able to do with OSSRH (which was retired last year).

By the way. If you were ever in doubt, this blog is, and will always be, 100% written by me. There is no AI involved, which you probably can tell by the spelling errors and (mostly) readable language. No generated slop here, only potentially sloppy human mistakes.

DeveloperWeek 2026

This was my second time as a speaker at DeveloperWeek. This time it was located in San Jose, California. It is still a fairly well attended event, but it felt a little smaller this time than when I attended three years ago. The focus is a bit different than the usual conferences I attend and speak at. I don’t think I have had to explain what Eclipse Foundation is and does as often at any conference before.

I presented The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java on the first day of the conference. As the main conference started on Thursday, this was practically a day-zero event with separate passes and potentially a different audience.

The talks on the first day are called workshops, but are really regular 50-minutes long technical sessions. For the rest of the conference, the session length is 25 minutes, so in that regard speaking on this day is better. It is really hard to give a good technical talk in 25 minutes. The downside is that there is a little fewer attendees on this day than on the first conference day. But still a decent outcome.

My talk went well, all demos worked, and I got some good questions and chats afterwards.

On Friday, I was part of a panel regarding “Low cost, big impact marketing”. The panel was moderated by Stephen Chin from Neo4j. All the panelists had roles within developer relations, or developer marketing if you like.

We talked about the importance of being present at conferences, where the developers are, the importance of the hallway track.

Another topic we discussed where how to nurture and scale the community around the product/project/technology we are advocating for.

An interesting touch by Steve at the end was to do the Q&A on the floor among the attendees and not on the stage. That way everyone can ask their question to the panelist they wanted rather than having to listen to all panelists responding to someone else’s question.

The best part of attending a conference is meeting and catching up with old and new friends. The hallway track…

JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG 2026

When I Code Java was cancelled with short notice,Phillip, Buhake and I scrambled and created a substitute event. With funds from the Eclipse Foundation concept of Open Community Meetup and the organisation of Jozi-JUG, we created JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG where Phillip and I presented. The event had 208 registered attendees.

I started the evening by presenting The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java. Phillip took over after me and presented AI with (and in) Quarkus. We were hosted by Investec, who also provided food and drinks for us. After the talks prices and swag were raffled out to the attendees. This is always very appreciated.

This was the first JakartaOne by [JUG] we have done, but it certainly won’t be the last. We even discussed turning it into a half-day or full-day conference and brand it as JakartaOne South Africa or JakartaOne Johannesburg next year.

Hashtag Jakarta EE #320

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Ooops, I amn an little late publishing Hashtag Jakarta EE number 320. I am currently on my way home from Johannesburg and a successful JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG. I will write more about the event in a separate post next week. Speaking of next week, Immediately after returning from South Africa, I will head to San Jose, California for DeveloperWeek.

Since I have been busy traveling, I don’t have much update regarding what’s going on with Jakarta EE 12, but according to the minutes of the call this week, the estimated release date looks like it will be pushed out to Q4 this year. Delivering it in 2026 is the important aspect, not necessarily the month. This gives the platform team and the indivicual specifications a little more time to get their work don.

Registration for Open Community eXperience in Brussels, April 21-23 is open. I have a 20% discount code, so DM me if you are interested in attending this conference.


Hashtag Jakarta EE #319

Welcome to issue number three hundred and nineteen of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

As I am writing this, I am sitting in my hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa. Me being here is actually as success story. I was supposed to present Jakarta EE at I Code Java on Tuesday and Wednesday. I have spoken at the conference twice before. Once in Cape Town and once here in Johannesburg. But that was back in 2018 and 2019. A couple of weeks ago the speakers got notified that the conference was cancelled. With flights and accommodations already booked, plans made, Phillip, Buhake and I scrambled and created a substitute event. With funds from the Eclipse Foundation concept of Open Community Meetup and the organisation of Jozi-JUG, we created JakartaOne by Jozi-JUG where Phillip and I will be presenting. The event has 136 registered attendees as of today.

It looks like the release of Jakarta EE 12 may be rescheduled to be in Q4 rather than Q1 this year. Most of the vendors are working on their Jakarta EE 11 implementations, and only a couple of specifications are in a good state for Jakarta EE 12. One of them is Jakarta Persistence 4.0 that is already implemented by a alpha release of Hibernate 8.

GlassFish 8.0.0 was released earlier this week, which means that the GlassFish project, lead by the wonderful folks at OmniFish, will be able start focusing on the Jakarta EE 12 implementation.

I also want to remind you about Open Community eXperience 2026 in Brussels on April 21-23. Registration is open. Make sure to secure you spot now, and show up to my talk.


Jfokus 2026

This year’s Jfokus was probably the busiest I have had. My schedule filled up even though I didn’t have a talk at this year’s conference. This year, I joined the group of volunteer stage hosts, so I had the pleasure of introducing speakers in one of the rooms on Wednesday afternoon.

Whenever I am at Jfokus, I host the Jfokus 2026 Morning Run, and this year was no exception. 11 brave runners showed up at 7:15 on Wednesday morning for a refreshing run. Half of the group returned after a 5km loop, while the other half ran all around Kungsholmen, which is about 10km.

New at Jfokus this year was the Mentoring Hub, organized by Bruno Souza. On Tuesday afternoon, I hosted a session about how to Advance Your Career in Open Source.

In addition, while I was on the plane from Brussels to Stockholm, I received a text message from Sharat Chander and Heather VanCura inviting Bruno and me to join their session on Tuesday morning. The session was titled Java: To Infinity and beyond and my contribution to it was to speak a little about how individuals and community members can help influence Java and the ecosystem by contributing in different ways.

FOSDEM’26

FOSDEM is a very special kind of event, and the 2006 edition was no exception. It is organised at a university campus, it is free for attendees, and there is a massive amount of exhibitors that are involved in open source in one way or the other. It is the place to be for the open source community, no question about that.

Since there were no Java devroom at the conference this year, some dedicated members of the Java community met up at Bier Centraal on Saturday night. As always when we meet, there were some discussions and ideas coming out of it. Nobody will ever know if it is because fo the Belgian beer or not…

Among other things, we planned for how we can scramble to see if we can get the Java devroom back at FOSDEM next year.

True to tradition, Eclipse Foundation had a booth at FOSDEM. We were almost 20 present from the Foudation at FOSDEM this year, so the booth had excellent coverage from the various technologies and projects that are represented among the more than 400 projects at Eclipse Foundation. The spin-the-wheel-to-win-swag was extremely popular. As was the chance to win a Lego set in the raffle at the end of each day. FOSDEM is an excellent event for us to meet and talk to the open source community.