I’ve been involved in Java EE since the very beginning, Having written one of the first ever books on Java EE. My involvement in Java EE / Jakarta EE has been on an education / advocacy role. Having written books, articles, blog posts and given talks in conferences about the technology. I advocate Jakarta EE not because I’m paid to do so, but because I really believe it is a great technology. I’m a firm believer that the fact that Jakarta EE is a standard, with multiple competing implementations, results in very high quality implementations, since Jakarta EE avoids vendor lock-in and encourages competition, benefiting developers.

Oracle’s donation of Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation was well received and celebrated by the Java EE community. Many prominent community members had been advocating for a more open process for Java EE, which is exactly what Jakarta EE, under the stewardship from the Eclipse Foundation provides.

There are some fundamental changes on how Jakarta EE is managed, that differ from Java EE, that benefit the Jakarta EE community greatly.

Fundamental differences between Java EE and Jakarta EE Management

Some of the differences in the way Jakarta EE is managed as opposed to Java EE are that there is no single vendor controlling the technology, there is free access to the TCK and there is no reference implementation.

No single company controls the standard

First and foremost, we no longer have a single company as a steward of Jakarta EE. Instead, we have several companies who have a vested interest in the success of the technology working together to develop the standard. This has the benefit that the technology is not subject to the whims of any one vendor, and, if any of the vendors loses interest in Jakarta EE, others can easily pick up the slack. The fact that there is no single vendor behind the technology makes Jakarta EE very resilient, it is here to stay.

TCK freely accessible

Something those of us involved heavily in Jakarta EE (and Java EE before), take for granted, but that may not be clear to others, is that Jakarta EE is a set of specifications with multiple implementations. Since the APIs are defined in a specification, they don’t change across Jakarta EE implementations, making Jakarta EE compliant code portable across implementations. For example, a Jakarta EE compliant application should run with minimal or no modifications on popular Jakarta EE implementations such as Apache Tomee, Payara, IBM’s OpenLiberty or Red Hat’s Thorntail

One major change that Jakarta EE has against Java EE is the fact that the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) is open source and free. The TCK is a set of test to verify that a Jakarta EE implementation is 100% compliant with all Jakarta EE specifications. With Java EE, organizations wanting to create a Java EE implementation, had to pay large sums of money to gain access to the TCK, once their implementation passed all the tests, their implementation was certified as Java EE compatible. The fact that the TCK was not freely accessible became a barrier to innovation, as smaller organizations and open source developers not always had the funds to get access to the TCK. Now that the TCK is freely accessible, the floodgates will open, and we should see a lot more quality implementations of Jakarta EE.

No reference implementation

Another major change between Java EE and Jakarta EE is that Java EE had the concept of a reference implementation. The idea behind having a Java EE reference implementation was to prove that suggested API specifications were actually feasible to implement. Having a reference implementation, however, had a side effect. If the reference implementation implemented something that wasn’t properly defined in the specification, then many developers expected all Java EE implementations to behave the same way, making the reference implementation a de-facto Java EE specification of sorts. Jakarta EE does away with the concept of a reference implementation, and will have multiple compatible implementations instead. The fact that there isn’t a reference implementation in Jakarta EE will result in more complete specifications, as differences in behavior between implementations will bring to light deficiencies in the specifications, these deficiencies can then be addressed by the community.

Conclusion

With multiple organizations with a vested interest in Jakarta EE’s success, a lowered barrier of entry for new Jakarta EE implementations, and better specifications Jakarta EE will become the de-facto standard in server-side Java development.