The Apache TomEE community has announced the release of TomEE 8.0 – Milestone 1 (M1) – a major step forward for TomEE.

Tomitribe and TomEE

TomEE is a project that members of Tomitribe have been working on and supporting for years and our efforts to release TomEE 8.0 was significant. Tomitribe is proud to contribute to the project. A special thanks to all the other committers for their hard work as well!

Java EE 8

This is the first TomEE release that provides support for Java EE 8 and Jakarta EE, where two new specs were introduced:

JSON-B, a well-needed specification to provide the binding between JSON and POJOs, mandatory for the development of modern REST APIs.

EE Security API, to simplify and modernize how all the security is handled in the container. Both David Blevins and Jean-Louis Monteiro actively participated in this specification.

And also, some updates to existing specifications:

You should be able to try most of these new features in the Milestone 1 Release (M1) of TomEE 8. Since this is not yet a final version, the EE Security API implementation is still missing. It should be available in one of the next Milestones or the Final version.

MicroProfile 1.3

Support for MicroProfile continues, updating from MicroProfile 1.2 in TomEE 7 to MicroProfile 1.3 in TomEE 8.0.

Not only can you find updates for MicroProfile Configuration and Metrics, but also new specifications for OpenTracing, OpenAPI, and Rest Client.

In addition, TomEE already supports CDI 2.0, JSON-P 1.1, JAX-RS 2.1 and JSON-B 1.0, which are introduced in MicroProfile 2.0. Only a few minor updates remain for TomEE 8.0 to be full MicroProfile 2.0 compliant. The community is making an effort to have everything done for the final release.

Try it out

The binaries can be downloaded from the Apache TomEE website. Please, be advised that this release is not yet recommended for production usage. Still, you are encouraged to try it out in your development environments and report any issues to the TomEE project.

Future

More Milestones are expected from TomEE 8 until it reaches the final release. One thing that the community is trying to improve is the release process. Instead of having big bang releases with long cycles, we would like to move to a shorter release cycle with smaller changes. An approach that is now also adopted by the Java platform.

If you wish to help with the efforts, don’t hesitate to join the TomEE mailing list.