This post was originally published at Red Hat Developers.

Today at the DevNation conference in San Francisco, Red Hat’s Mark Little was joined on-stage by Alasdair Nottingham from IBM, Theresa Nguyen from Tomitribe, Mike Croft from Payara and Martijn Verburg from the London Java Community to announce a new community collaboration - MicroProfile - whose goal is to make it easier for developers to use familiar Java EE technologies and APIs for building microservice applications.

Mark talked about some of the reasons Java EE has established itself as the dominant standard for companies building business-critical multi-tier enterprise applications, including :

An open standard platform that enables vendors to compete on implementation, price, or business model

A collaborative standard and process that is driven by many vendors and individual developers rather than a single vendor

Consistent and holistic vision for all architectural tiers of the application

A strong focus on adherence to the standard and compatibility between vendor implementations and versions of the specifications

As organizations start to think about the next generation of those business-critical applications, many of them are likely thinking about cloud-native, Linux containers and microservices, and how they evolve by using the technologies and skills they already have.

Red Hat, IBM, Payara, Tomitribe and the London Java Community believe that Enterprise Java is a solid foundation on which to build the next generation of applications and the MicroProfile (which may ultimately become a submission for a standard specification) can make it easier and provide portability between vendor’s implementations. The first release of the MicroProfile is expected to be available in September, with Red Hat’s implementation to be based on WildFly Swarm.

Red Hat continues to support those in the Enterprise Java community that are working hard to move Enterprise Java forward by pushing ahead on the evolution of Java EE. To emphasize this point, Red Hat has underlined its support for Java EE 8 and is committed to finishing the JSRs it leads, like CDI 2.0, and any necessary enhancements to Bean Validation while it also invests in the MicroProfile. We see synergy between the current Enterprise Java community efforts and the newly announced MicroProfile, which is born out of the same Enterprise Java community. To us it’s clear that the Enterprise Java community is forging ahead.

Red Hat understands that Enterprise Java has been successful for almost two decades thanks to the community collaboration that drove its evolution. Please join and participate in the MicroProfile effort and let’s all take the next step forward by cooperatively innovating to bring the microservice architecture to Enterprise Java.