With the greatest pleasure I can report that IBM WebSphere Liberty 8.5 has recently been Java EE 7 certified! WebSphere joins the ranks of GlassFish 4, WildFly 8, Hitachi Cosminexus and TmaxSoft JEUS. With the very broad customer base that both IBM and WebSphere have globally this is very welcome news for Java EE 7 indeed. IBM has long been a very strong JCP supporter. They led the very well received Java Batch API included in Java EE 7 - bringing to bear their decades of deep expertise in mission critical batch processing. All of the Java EE certified offerings are always listed on the official Java EE compatibility page.

WebSphere Liberty is a modern, fast, lightweight and highly modular Java EE implementation. In fact using it's modular architecture WebSphere Liberty has been releasing parts of Java EE 7 into their fully supported service stream for a few months now (note that we've essentially done the same with WebLogic 12.1.3 during JavaOne 2014). Holly Cummins explains well the evolution of WebSphere Liberty and why it's a game changer especially for IBM customers. Liberty's approach to modularity makes it possible to upgrade to Java EE 7 incrementally without a reinstall and even continue running existing applications against a Java EE 6 runtime baseline. The Java EE 7 certification announcement from Laura Cowen can be found here and you can download WebSphere Liberty here.

As many of you know full Java EE 7 compatibility is one of the most significant goals of the upcoming WebLogic 12.2.1 release. The Apache TomEE team is also working on bringing forward Java EE 7 features. Judging by past history of release cycles for JBoss AS and JBoss EAP it's reasonable to think JBoss EAP will likely be Java EE 7 certified within this year (for those unaware WildFly is the upstream project for JBoss EAP much like JBoss AS once was). By the end of this year Java EE 7 users should have well over a half-a-dozen fully compatible platforms to choose from.

So the question now is who will be next to cross the Java EE 7 compatibility finish line - only to start working on their Java EE 8 implementation :-).