That’s right, Eclipse Glassfish 5.1.0.RC2, the Jakarta EE implementation, has been published in maven central. Eclipse Glassfish 5.1.0 release is terribly close.

Latest Glassfish in maven central, Eclipse Glassfish 5.1.0.RC1, publicly available couple of months, is mostly identical to Oracle Glassfish 5.0.1, the latest Java EE reference implementation. It contains many Java EE projects and dependencies, and it has been released mainly for the Eclipse community to introduce Jakarta EE, its functionality, and to demonstrate the commitment of all people working on Jakarta EE.

Eclipse Glassfish 5.1.0.RC2 is very close to the final version, all the Java EE compatibility tests passed there, while it depends on Jakarta EE APIs and implementation rather than Java EE ones.

Comparing Java EE and Jakarta EE, functionally, there is only a minimal difference. That was the goal, to transfer the Java EE to Jakarta EE without changes in the API, so that the community can smoothly deploy the projects from a Java EE application server to the Jakarta EE application server. Only major bug fixes in the functionality were allowed.

Jakarta EE was focused on bringing the projects close to the community. Everyone with enough enthusiasm can start contributing to a project and become a committer. Most of the projects do use Travis CI and the projects contain Travis scripts so that anyone who wants to contribute can run the tests in his own GitHub fork on Travis CI (after registering there). For the projects, committers have access to Eclipse Jenkins infrastructure, where any build and test jobs can be set up. Unlike with Java EE, the compatibility tests are available, with a description of how to use them. There is a Jakarta EE wikipedia , and each project has its own mailing list.

Apart from these new things, the license of projects has been changed. The code is available under EPL 2.0 license, whereas examples are available under EDL 1.0 license.

The main positive thing, though, is that it is the interest of the community that decides about the future of the Jakarta EE projects.