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

I have been home a week since JConf Dominicana 2026, and today I am setting course for Crete to be a part of JCrete 2026. This unconference in the Mediterranean in the middle of summer has become a tradition for me since I first attended more than ten years ago.

Even if the summer holidays are upon us, the Jakarta EE Platform project continues to meet every Tuesday in the Platform call. There is a bit of progress in the Jakarta RESTful Web Services project now, so it seems like they will be able to publish a milestone soon with the changes needed to deprecate and eventually remove the custom component model in favor of CDI. A final release will be available for Jakarta EE 12.

The limits that were recently introcuced for publication to Maven Central is stirring up the open source community. There are discussions among the Java Champions for how to cope with this. A suggestion that a vendor-neutral model like the one for Open VSX may be a possible way forward should it continue to be a problem. Good to know is that projects hosted at Eclipse Foundation currently have no limitations for publishing artifacts to Maven Central.

A little over a week ago, the Java Documentary by CultRepo titled The Java Story was released. You should really watch it to get a glimpse of this amazing community and ecosystem around Java. I am also pleased to be featured in the documentary. Not a big part, but I am there representing the community, Jakarta EE, Eclipse Foundation, Enterprise Java, and open source in general.