Foundation Java EE: The Community Reacts

08/23/2017

?In September, Oracle chose the Eclipse Foundation to be the new home of the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE). Oracle made the decision in collaboration with IBM and Red Hat, the two other largest contributors to the platform. 

"…The Eclipse Foundation has strong experience and involvement with Java EE and related technologies," wrote Oracle software evangelist David Delabassee in a blog post. This will help us transition Java EE rapidly, create community-friendly processes for evolving the platform, and leverage complementary projects such as MicroProfile. We look forward to this collaboration."

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, was optimistic about this move, which he said is exactly what enterprise Java needs and what the community has been hoping for.

"The open source model has been shown time and again to be the best way to innovate and collaborate successfully," he told me. "As enterprises move to a more cloud-centric model, it's pretty clear that Java EE requires a more rapid pace of innovation. Also, moving Java to the Eclipse Foundation is going to be a great opportunity for vendors, who haven't always had the best time collaborating. This will give them a reliable platform on which to collaborate going forward, and it will support the more rapid pace of innovation that Java EE needs."

When Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java Platform Group, first announced that his company was considering a new home for enterprise Java, I reached out to several Java community leaders to get their take on this idea. The announcement drew mostly positive reactions. Software architect and consultant Reza Rahman, a former enterprise Java evangelist at Oracle and one of the founders of The Java EE Guardians, was delighted by the news, as were many of the other Guardians. Generally speaking, they counted the news as a victory with great potential for the future of enterprise Java. 

"I definitely think this is a very positive move by Oracle that we should all appreciate wholeheartedly," Rahman said. "It is a foundational and promising change for the entire Java ecosystem and perhaps even for global IT. It represents a critical step towards further opening up [of] Java. The onus is now on the entire ecosystem, including vendors and the community, to make the best of it and actively engage Oracle."

Another founding member of the Guardians, Kito Mann, said he was "very excited" about Foundation Java EE. Mann, who is principal consultant at Virtua Inc., specializes in enterprise app architecture, training, development, and mentoring with JavaServer Faces, HTML5, portlets, Liferay and Java EE technologies. 

"I think moving Java EE to an open source foundation guarantees that it has a bright future," Mann told me, "and that it will continue to grow with help from the community, as well as other vendors. Most importantly, I'm hopeful that this will accelerate the rate of releases and the pace of innovation."

Martijn Verburg, CEO of jClarity, co-organizer of the London Java User Group, and a member of the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee, also saw potential in the idea. 

"Oracle opening up the technical part of Java EE is very, very welcome," Verburg said, "and will be of benefit to Oracle itself (they can share the heavy burden of the workload). However, it comes with one massive caveat: At this stage, Oracle will not move the branding over, which I and others think would be of a massive detriment to the newly opened platform going forwards. That issue has been raised with Oracle but I imagine the negotiations over this point will take some time."

Chicago-based developer, blogger, and author, Josh Juneau, said the move would be "one of the most significant events to occur in the Java space in quite some time."

"The Java EE Platform, in my opinion, is very mature and it is backed by a large enough portion of the community, large corporations and smaller organizations alike, that it will benefit from it becoming an open platform," he said. "Though there are still many questions to be answered, such as licensing and governance or direction moving forward, this first step is very positive."

Michael Remijan, senior Java EE developer and system architect at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, agreed that Foundation Java EE would be a good thing for enterprise Java. But he also pointed to some likely challenges. He anticipated "an enormous branding challenge" for the any foundation that took on the technologies. 

"Java EE began its life as J2EE, and despite being rebranded many years ago, J2EE is still being used," he said. "The open source foundation will face a similar challenge, possibly even a greater challenge if Oracle retains the 'Java EE' name." 

Mann expected challenges, too: "I think the biggest challenge is coming up with the correct governing model. Regardless of what one may think about the JCP, it had a very specific process. We'll need to make sure that Java EE retains an open, well-defined process that still allows for having specifications with different implementations (that is, after all, the hallmark of Java EE). This might pave the way towards opening up Java itself." 

Juneau agreed: "If Oracle does hand off Java EE to an open source foundation, such as Eclipse, there are likely to be transitional pains. The open sourcing of the TCKs will likely take some time, as there is probably some work to be done with these before they can be handed over. Although MicroProfile is a good example of how cleanly a project can be moved to an open source foundation, it did not carry with it all the legacy that Java EE contains. So yes, I think that there are many answers that are still up in the air and situations that will need to be worked out in order to facilitate a clean transition from Oracle to any open foundation."

Wayne Citrin, CTO and co-founder of JNBridge, has been watching the evolution of Java since it was five years old, and he reservedjudgment on the proposed relocation. 

"It's not clear to me what Oracle really wants to do," he told me. "Do they want to wash their hands of Java EE and let the community maintain it and develop new features? If so, that's unfortunate, as I question whether any proposed foundation and associated community would have the resources to take on this project. (The Java EE Guardians should be careful what they wish for.) Or, is Oracle just proposing a way to formalize community input? If that's the case, then fine, although I suspect there are ways to do the same thing without imposing the infrastructure of a foundation."

Gartner analyst Ann Thomas has seen the writing on the wall for Java EE, and she doubted that moving it to an open source foundation would change its trajectory. 

"Java EE is now 'end of life,'" she said. "Oracle's action to farm it off to an open source community indicates that Oracle deems it an unworthy investment, i.e., they can't make any money from EE anymore. No one wants to pay Oracle for the right to sell a branded 'Java EE' platform. As I've said before, Java EE is a legacy model that has little value in modern application design. The Java Guardians might be happy about it, but they really need to recognize that EE is past its prime. They should be focusing on lighter weight infrastructure."

She added that "the demise of Java EE" doesn't mean Java is no longer a useful language for enterprise development. "Quite the opposite," she said. "Java SE is all you need for enterprise Java. But developers like a profile that makes it easier for them to include a basic set of classes and APIs in their packages. Hence, developers will value [Eclipse] MicroProfile" 

Rahman, of course, didn’t share Thomas's view of Java EE, but he allowed that, even if it found a home in an open source foundation, the platform would continue to need strong and energized support from the community. 

"The most important role for the community at large and the Java EE Guardians in general is being vocal about what we think the right thing is on the path to fully opening up Java EE," he said. "This, of course, is in addition to the goals we have already outlined in our recently updated charter. This includes continuing to advocate for Java EE, educate the broader community, encourage participation and help ensure Java EE 9 and beyond keeps moving forward."

Several other Guardians blogged on the future of Foundation Java EE. Here's a partial list of posts worth reading. (Thanks to Rahman for the rec): 

• Sebastian Daschner, freelance consultant, Java developers and architect
• Markus Karg, long-time Java developer and guru
• Dominika Tasarz, head of marketing and community development at Payara
• Mark Little, VP of Engineering and CTO of JBoss Middleware at Red Hat
• Ian Robinson, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect at the WebSphere Foundation 
• Ivar Grimstad, Java Champion, JUG leader, and JCP Executive Committee member.