Welcome to issue number three hundred and thirty-one of Hashtag Jakarta EE!
I am currently in Coimbra, Portugal, for ShiftAPPens 2026. This is the ninth edition of this hackathon that is organised by and for students. As a Gold sponsor, Jakarta EE was allowed to have a challenge in the hackathon. Among the 150 students in various stages of their education, eight teams of up to four members chose to take on our challenge. At the time of writing this post, we hadn’t yet selected the winner among them. Directly after the closing of ShiftAPPens, I will continue to England to give a guest lecture at the University of York.
An interesting thing that came out of Open Community eXperience last week is this analyst report about Jakarta EE from ECI. It is a good writeup that highlights that Jakarta EE is built for longevity rather than being first on the hype curve. The article also points out that vendor-neutral integration standards will become increasingly valuable in the enterprise market.
For Jakarta EE 12, Milestone 4 is approaching. The Jakarta EE Platform project expects to see deliverables from the following individual specifications for this milestone:
- REST 5.0 M1 API / spec
- CDI 5.0 Milestone / Beta (currently at Alpha4)
- JSON-P 2.2 M1 API / spec
- JSON-B 3.1 M1 API / spec
Check out the Jakarta EE 12 planning board for the current status.
Next weekend, I will be speaking at JavaConnect KE 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya. This will be a brand new talk about how to augment LLMS with various agentic techniques using Jakarta EE as the foundation. This will be my first visit to Kenya, so I am really looking forward to connect with the local Java community there.
