Jakarta EE Community Survey of 1,800+ Java Developers Reveals “Cloud Native” Top Requirement in Platform’s Evolution

The Eclipse Foundation conducts largest survey to date of Java community on key priorities for future releases of Jakarta EE.

OTTAWA, April 24, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – The Eclipse Foundation, the platform for open collaboration and innovation, today announced the release of its first survey of the Jakarta EE community to reveal the top priorities of developers for evolving the technology stack. For many years, Java EE has been the de facto platform for millions of developers and operators running enterprise systems – offering reliable multi-vendor standards, ubiquitous in datacenters across every industry, and delivering stability and scalability on the back-end of the world’s mission critical applications. In late 2017, Oracle announced that it was transferring the future of Java EE technologies to the Eclipse Foundation, to make the process of evolving its standards “more agile, flexible and open.”

The Eclipse Foundation conducted a worldwide survey of more than 1,800 Java developers worldwide in March 2018 to identify top priorities in the developer community for critical new technical capabilities in future iterations of Jakarta EE. Two of the community’s top three priorities for Jakarta show a consensus that the platform evolve to support cloud native development, while the third priority emphasizes the need for a faster pace of innovation on the platform.

“Jakarta EE’s mission is more frequent releases, lowered barriers to participation, and putting the community back into the platform,” said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director at Eclipse Foundation. “In this first polling of the community, the feedback was very specific that developers seek more cloud native support for enterprise Java systems. This means not only continuing the evolution of popular projects like Eclipse MicroProfile, but exploring integration with other projects in the cloud native stack, recruiting major cloud providers to contribute code, and deeper focus on the cloud modernization use cases that so many enterprise Java shops face today.”

Jakarta EE is a new undertaking and everything that has occurred previously on the Java EE platform will remain called Java EE and comply with licensing agreements with Oracle. Future work will be led by the Jakarta EE Working Group, a consortium of vendors working collaboratively with a global community of open source developers operating under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation.

The stakeholders of the Jakarta EE community are committed to a cloud native future for the platform. According to the Eclipse Foundation survey, two critical gaps in Java EE are now top priorities for Jakarta: better support for microservices and cloud native integration with Kubernetes, the open source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications that was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. At the same time, developers want to see more releases and more rapid innovation.

Better Support for Microservices (60%)

• Nearly half (45%) of the developers surveyed are already building microservices, with another 21 percent planning to join them in the next year. It’s only a matter of time before most of the rest follow suit. There will always be some laggards. But a full 95 percent of the respondents said they are using Java to build microservices, which is followed by Docker containers at just over 50 percent.

Native Integration with Kubernetes (57%)

• Half of survey respondents said they ran only a fifth of their Java applications today in a cloud. But over 30 percent said that within the next two years they expect to be running 60 percent of more of their applications in the cloud. Kubernetes emerged in the survey as a favored path for making Jakarta EE cloud native, although other alternative paths may still emerge in the working group. Nearly a third of respondents report they are already working with Kubernetes.

Faster Pace of Innovation (47%)

• Nearly half of the respondents said Jakarta EE needs to innovate faster than the legacy Java EE platform. Jakarta EE is about defining the future of Java in the enterprise – especially when it comes to building cloud native applications. As scores of other hugely successful open source projects have shown, a consortium of vendors can drive acceleration at a much faster and sustainable rate than any single vendor or standards body.

The arrival of Jakarta EE represents a renaissance for the Java community. Survey respondents made it clear that as Java EE is evolving into Jakarta EE, this remains the platform they rely on most to build true enterprise-class applications. Under the Eclipse Foundation, the Jakarta EE Working Group will be based on a self-governing meritocracy that sets all technical agendas and plans. Details on the roadmap for Jakarta EE will be emerging in the months to come. The founding members of the Jakara EE Working Group are Fujitsu, IBM, Oracle, Lightbend, Payara Systems, Pivotal, Red Hat, Tomitribe and Webtide.

How to Participate in the Future Of Jakarta EE

Start by subscribing to the jakarta.ee-wg@eclipse.org working group mailing list. To join, a company can simply email the list declaring a commitment to participate along with a membership in the Eclipse Foundation. There are no fees in 2018 to participate in the Jakarta EE Working Group. Additionally, developers can directly engage with the community through the jakarta.ee-community@eclipse.org mailing list.

About the Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation provides a global community of individuals and organizations with a mature, scalable and commercially-focused environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE and over 350 open source projects, including runtimes, tools and frameworks for a wide range of technology domains such as IoT, automotive, geospatial, systems engineering and many others. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit organization supported by over 275 corporate members, including industry leaders who value open source as a key enabler for business strategy. To learn more, follow us on Twitter @EclipseFdn, LinkedIn or visit eclipse.org.

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Editorial Contact Lonn Johnston +1 650.219.7764 lonn@flak42.com

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