If you’ve been following the news about Oracle’s new direction for Java EE, you’ll know that one of the motivations for changing the governance and process is to move Java EE forward in a more agile and responsive manner.

So it’s a good sign that within a month of initially announcing their intentions, Oracle (with help from IBM and Red Hat) have chosen the Eclipse Foundation as the future home for Java EE. You can read Oracle's announcement here.

This is a pretty important, first, tangible step in moving Enterprise Java forward and it’s encouraging to see Oracle moving ahead at a rapid pace. Java EE is an established technology that many organizations depend on for their business critical applications. Java EE is also a large body of work with Technology Specifications, Reference Implementations and TCKs from multiple vendors and open source projects so there’s still a significant amount of work yet to happen - but this is a great start.

Oracle's announcement to move Java EE to an Open Source foundation has already begun to energize the community, offering the opportunity to more quickly evolve the platform to meet modern workloads. The Eclipse Foundation will be significant enabler in that evolution and Red Hat fully supports Oracle’s decision. Eclipse already hosts many projects of a similar size and complexity as Java EE, and we’re confident that the many years of experience and expertise the Eclipse Foundation has with other Java technologies ensures that this will be a successful move.

MicroProfile is also an Eclipse Foundation project and Red Hat hopes this will make it easier to align Java EE and MicroProfile in the future. The MicroProfile project was started in June 2016 as a collaboration between Red Hat, IBM, Tomitribe, Payara and others in the Java community with the goal of making Enterprise Java more relevant to developers building cloud-native applications.

Red Hat is an Eclipse Foundation member and has worked with the Eclipse Foundation for many years on projects as diverse as JBossTools, IoT, Kapua, Vert.x and Che and we look forward to working with with Oracle, IBM, The Eclipse Foundation and others on the future of Java EE.