The Eclipse Foundation recently announced two milestone achievements in September 2018: the migration of GlassFish source code from Oracle has been completed; and the Java EE TCK is now open-sourced at Eclipse.

GlassFish Application Server

The migration of GlassFish source code from Oracle has been completed. Considered a major milestone for the advancement of Jakarta EE and a new era for GlassFish, the announcement continued to say:

This is another step in making Jakarta EE a vehicle for innovation in cloud-native application development.

Eclipse GlassFish, currently based on the Java EE specification, will ultimately be compliant with Jakarta EE. When Eclipse unveiled the new cloud native future with Jakarta EE in late-April, InfoQ asked Mike Milinkovich, executive director at the Eclipse Foundation, about two committed releases in 2018. He stated:

We're committing to two releases of the technology projects that are moving into Eclipse this year. So they're going to be dubbed Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 and 5.2. Eclipse GlassFish 5.1, which is going to be the first time we actually ship all these projects from the Eclipse Foundation, and is going to be a major milestone in terms of on-boarding all of these projects. This is going to be certified as Java EE 8 compatible using the original Java EE TCKs. Then as soon as we can after that, we're going to spin a 5.2 release which will be Jakarta EE 8 compatible.

The GlassFish release plan, recently approved by the Eclipse PMC, includes a RC1 release in late-October and a version 5.1 GA release in mid-December. The Java community is encouraged to contribute to GlassFish and EE4J projects, especially in the area of CI/CD pipelines, by registering on the EE4J projects status sheet.

In a September 2018 Jakarta EE status update, Milinkovich stated:

100% of Glassfish and related Java EE reference implementation components from Oracle have now been contributed, and published to GitHub repositories of the EE4J organization. For those of us at the Eclipse Foundation, part of the reason why this is so huge is that to a large degree, we've completed our part. The repos (99) have been provisioned, the committers (162) have been given access, and the initial intellectual property reviews (404) have been done. From this point on, progress on the projects is now largely under the control of the projects themselves.

Java EE Technology Compatibility Kit

Eclipse also announced that the Java EE TCK has been open-sourced. This long anticipated milestone provides four benefits for the Java community: transparency; openness; shared burden; and vendor neutrality.

Transparency means that vendors, customers, and the Java community can gain a better insight to the testing process by having access to the TCKs. Openness means supporting an open collaboration of new ideas and opportunities by expanding the number of contributors to the project. Shared burden and vendor neutrality means reducing the dependency of a single organization or group in the testing process.

Contributions to the TCKs have already started as 18 commits from four developers representing two companies have been submitted.

EE4J Project Status

Eclipse maintains an evergreen status of all the EE4J projects:

The x-axis is defined as percent completed:

20% - project proposal for community review

40% - project committers and resources have been provisioned

60% - an initial contribution provided to the Eclipse IP Team

80% - an initial contribution pushed to Git repository

100% - project has engaged in its first Release Review

There has been significant progress on all EE4J projects since May 2018.

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