Planning for Jakarta EE 9.1

In the December 15 Platform Project call, the platform team made a couple of important decisions regarding the upcoming Jakarta EE 9.1 release.

The goal of Jakarta EE 9.1 is to ship Java SE 11 support as soon as possible. That means that we want to minimize releasing new API artifacts unless necessary. Specification teams are able to make changes and do minor updates if they wish, or have to in order to support Java SE 11. In order to avoid putting these on the critical path of the release, the platform team decided to enforce a deadline for announcing these changes. The deadline for starting a plan review for potential inclusion in Jakarta EE 9.1 is set to January 31, 2021.

Please refer to the December 15 meeting minutes for details.

The plan for Jakarta EE 9.1 has not been finalized yet but will be communicated on the Jakarta EE Platform Project pages shortly. I have taken the liberty to sketch a very loose outline for the plan below.

The only date communicated so far is the deadline for engaging in a plan review for specification projects. That deadline is January 31, 2020. The actual release date (T) is not decided yet, but it is a fair assumption that the Jakarta EE 9.1 specification will go on ballot for release review about 14 days prior to this date. Any specifications that are updated for this release will have to go to ballot before this. Preferably as soon as possible, but no later than 14 days before the platform ballot starts in order to complete on time.

A plan review is an important step in the Jakarta EE Specification Process (JESP). This is where a project team presents its plans for the Specification Team and the community for feedback.

A plan review is initiated by creating a Pull Request to the specifications repository. To make it easier for a project team to know what information to include in a plan review, the specification committee has created an example of such a pull request. The example PR contains a checklist for the project team:

## Specification PR template
When creating a specification project plan review, create PRs with the content defined as follows.

Include the following in the PR:
- [ ] A directory in the form wombat/x.y where x.y is the release major.minor version.
- [ ] An index page wombat/x.y/_index.md following [template](https://github.com/jakartaee/specification-committee/blob/master/spec_page_template.md)
- [ ] Title should be on the form "Jakarta Wombat X.Y (under development)"
- [ ] Includes a plan for the release. Usually, a couple of statements is enough. Otherwise, a link to a document describing the release.
- [ ] Includes a detailed description of any backward incompatibility (Mark with **N/A** and check if none)
- [ ] Declares optional features if there are any (Mark with **N/A** and check if none)
- [ ] Includes minimum Java SE version
- [ ] Describe any updates or required changes including splitting out the TCK (Mark with **N/A** and check if not planned)
- [ ] Link to updated release record

The planned version’s _index.md file should look something like this:

---
title: "Jakarta Wombat 1.0 (under development)"
date: 2099-12-01
summary: "First release of Jakarta Wombat"
---

Jakarta Wombat 1.0 lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

*Minimum Java SE Version:* **17**

* [Jakarta Wombat 1.0 Release Record](https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/ee4j.wombat/releases/1.0)

Instructions for Jakarta EE Specification projects regarding reviews were communicated to project leads on the Jakarta EE Specification Project Leads mailing list in this message from the Specification Committee.