Yesterday I attended JakartaOne Dominican Republic.The event gathered a full room of around 40 attendees on a Thursday evening. This was the first JakartaOne in the Caribbean, but is certainly won’t be the last. The Java community all over the LATAM region is very active and vibrant, and the JakartaOne In-person event format fits very well.

After Eudris Cabrera kicked off the event, there were talks by Java Community leaders across the region. Diego Silva Limaco from Peru first presented how to get from zero to production in no time with Jakarta EE. He also presented the Jakarta Coffee Builder Plugin, an open source project of his that generates code and configuration on the fly using Maven. It sort of mimics the features provided by popular developer tools, such as Quarkus. A very cool project that I would take a look at if I were you.

Vicente Suc from Guatemala presented how to use technologies such as Testcontainers and Flyway to test Jakarta EE applications. He also pitched the local conference JConf Guatemala 2026 which will be on November 7 this year.

I had the honour of holding the closing session of the conference. I presented a brief history of enterprise Java, and Jakarta EE in particular before opening up the floor for an ask-me-anything session. There were lots of good questions and comments that continued during the pizza and drinks provided afterward.

A great event, a great community, a great experience!