To say that bringing Jakarta EE to life at the Eclipse Foundation was a massive undertaking is a gross understatement.
We started this effort in early 2018. Today, we have 39 open source projects (as part of the EE4J Top Level Project) representing 14% of our overall project space. These projects collectively have 99 Git repositories (most of which are hosted in the eclipse-ee4j GitHub organization; a small number are hosted on Eclipse Foundation infrastructure) representing 8% of the repositories created and managed by the Eclipse Foundation’s IT team. We have 162 committers working on these projects, representing 10% of our total active committer community. These projects have made a combined 440 requests to the Eclipse Foundation’s IP Team to review intellectual property, representing 17% of the work done by the team. The Jakarta EE projects have 53 distinct CI instances running (or in the planning stages to run) on Eclipse Foundation build infrastructure, representing 30% of our work there (on the topic of build, if you have some spare cycles and want to contribute, we can use your help).
Added to the all of the project-related work, we’ve also been doing a lot of other work to stand up the new Jakarta EE Working Group, bootstrap the new EE4J PMC, manage related trademarks and various legal agreements, recruit participants, build websites, improve infrastructure, hire and train new staff, and more.
By way of comparison, the work that we do with Eclipse IoT is at about the same scale, but grew more organically (one open source project at a time) over six years. Jakarta EE happened all at once.
While we engaged in this enormous chunk of work, we still did everything that we’ve always done. In just the first nine months of 2018, for example, the Eclipse Intellectual Property Team has already received and processed 30% more requests for reviews than they did in all of 2017! And the number of new project proposals, committers, and contributions (not including those that are related to Jakarta EE) that we’ve added in 2018 are on an upward trend compared with past years.
This has been an all-hands-on-deck sort of effort for the Eclipse Foundation staff. Even those of us who have not been directly involved in the work, have helped by taking on extra burdens so that those of use who were directly involved could stay focused.
This is not to say that we’ve done this alone: this has been a ginormous shared effort. We’ve had a lot of help from the Eclipse Foundation member companies that have contributed many talented people to the migration effort, and—of course—the members of our community who have stepped up.
I really want to name names, but the probability of me missing somebody is so high that I dare not. If you want to meet some of the key players, join us at EclipseCon Europe!
