We are an independent grassroots group of people committed to moving Jakarta EE forward through active community participation and advocacy. We believe that standardizing the core technologies used to build cloud native applications is better than being bound to proprietary solutions.
Java EE, and it’s successor Jakarta EE, have been the most successful set of open standards for developing mission critical business applications ever – on premise and on the cloud. It has been the linchpin of the Java platform’s domination and it is rare to find a Java application that doesn’t depend upon at least one Jakarta EE technology. It is the only business application development technology with a rich ecosystem of vendors who not only compete but cooperate to define a solid set of reliable open standard technologies. Closed ecosystems stymie market competition, limit consumer choices, cripple careers, and harm end-users. Even applications, projects and frameworks that do not explicitly acknowledge it are in fact heavily dependent on many Jakarta EE APIs today and going forward, regardless of sea changes like cloud or microservices. Just some of these APIs include Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta REST, Jakarta WebSocket, Jakarta Messaging, Jakarta Persistence, Jakarta Bean Validation, Jakarta Mail and so much more.
Few multi-vendor open standards are as widely implemented, supported, depended upon or as widely participated in as Jakarta EE. There is an extremely passionate, responsible community behind Jakarta EE – most technologies would be hard pressed to find anything like the Jakarta EE community.
Getting Involved
As critically important as Jakarta EE is and as much as it has going for it, there are challenges to overcome. Some of these factors are outlined in the history and challenges sections below. Continuing to successfully overcome these challenges is the primary goal of our grassroots community. Advocacy, raising awareness, coordination, collaboration and mutual support in the community are keys to accomplishing these goals. We encourage you to take a close look at the continuing work we do. We already have a number of individuals, organizations and user groups committed to working together to advance Jakarta EE. We need all the help we can get to ensure the best interests of the Jakarta EE community continues to be well served. We need the support of your voice and perhaps your volunteer time if you can afford to contribute it. There are many ways you could help.
Our role as an evangelism and advocacy body requires a civil, productive, professional, reasonable and respectful environment. To that end, the Jakarta EE Ambassadors adopt the open source Contributor Covenant as our code of conduct.
We believe that together we can create an ever brighter future for Java, Jakarta EE and cloud native computing.
Our History
The Jakarta EE Ambassadors were originally founded as the Java EE Guardians. In early 2016 Oracle appeared to lose focus on Java EE 8 progress. A community effort, which became the Java EE Guardians, was then made to document the lack of progress on the various specifications. This website was constructed. On the website, the objective findings of lack of progress were published with the goal of organizing the larger community and also encouraging Oracle to get the specifications moving forward again. In addition Java EE Guardians stepped up to move inactive specifications along.
At JavaOne 2016 Oracle announced the reboot of Java EE 8. At JavaOne 2017, Oracle released Java EE 8 and announced opening up Java EE by giving ownership of the Java EE code base to the Eclipse Foundation. Java EE has now been completely transferred to a truly open governance model as Jakarta EE. Jakarta EE represents one of the largest and most successful technology ownership transfers ever attempted. Oracle and the Eclipse Foundation, amongst many other parties, deserve due credit for the historic creation of Jakarta EE.
With the successful transition and opening up of Java EE as Jakarta EE, our group has shifted its attention to educating the broader Java community about Jakarta EE and encouraging active participation in the new open process to move Jakarta EE forward. The group was transitioned from the Java EE Guardians to the Jakarta EE Ambassadors to reflect this change in focus. We are grateful to the Eclipse Foundation and Jakarta EE stakeholders for recognizing our group and granting us the necessary tools to continue to operate as an independent grassroots community.
Challenges
One of the key challenges faced by our community is that many Java developers don’t realize that they use, benefit from and depend on Jakarta EE every day. For example, all of these are technologies related to Jakarta EE in one way or another – WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss EAP, WildFly, GlassFish, Payara, Tomcat, TomEE, Jetty, CXF, ActiveMQ, Jersey, Hibernate, PrimeFaces, Spring, Spring Boot, MicroProfile, Quarkus, Helidon.
Much like Java itself, Jakarta EE also has all the challenges of a relatively mature technology. There are many badly outdated or plain wrongheaded ideas held by many people about Jakarta EE. The core value proposition of Jakarta EE is even more important in cloud native applications, not less. Jakarta EE also competes with many highly aggressive non-standard solutions even within the Java ecosystem (ironically many of these solutions actually depend on Jakarta EE remaining strong) let alone beyond the JVM such as .NET.
The scope and complexity of Jakarta EE means that in order for it to evolve effectively, it requires the continued interest, collaboration and investment of many major players such as Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Fujitsu, Payara and Tomitribe. As well intentioned as these parties might be, without active engagement, participation and contribution from the broader community, decisions can become vendor focused and noncompetitive instead of remaining strongly focused on the needs of end users and industry.
The most effective way of addressing these challenges and moving Jakarta EE forward is grassroots community advocacy and participation. None of this is possible without your direct engagement and help.
Jakarta EE Ambassadors 