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Open Liberty is Jakarta EE 8 compatible

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Alasdair Nottingham on Sep 10, 2019
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Today is a big day in the enterprise Java world. Two years ago, Oracle announced their intention to move Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, which led to the creation of Jakarta EE. The goal was to move Java EE to a community-driven open source model for future enhancements. The dream is that doing this will enable Jakarta EE to evolve faster, allow more frequent releases, and address the needs of modern applications. The process of moving Java EE to Eclipse was not trivial, it was not simple, but it is finally complete with the release of Jakarta EE 8.

As momentous as this news is, this blog post is not about the release of Jakarta EE. This post is about the implications for Open Liberty. The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed in the past that Open Liberty was not Java EE-certified. This made us very sad, but we didn’t have a license for the Java EE TCK that would let us run them. That is not the case with Jakarta EE though.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Zech Hein, Scott Highbarger, Hank Ibell, Atosa Khoddamhazrati, Kevin Smith, Nichole Stewart, Gene Thoman, Martin Holder, Dave Waddling, and Chris Webster, I can announce that Open Liberty 19.0.0.6 has passed the Jakarta EE 8 TCK and the Jakarta EE Spec Committee has approved our Compatibility Request. This means that I can put this big shiny sailing ship logo down below and proudly say that Open Liberty is a Jakarta EE-compatible implementation:

JakartaEE Logo Compatible color

For those who have run the compatibility tests, you’ll know how much work is involved in getting here. For those who have not, rest assured that the Open Liberty team are committed to implementing and being compatible with the Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile programming models. If you’re really interested, here’s the Open Liberty 19.0.0.6 Jakarta EE Platform 8 Certification Summary.

To find out more about Open Liberty, take a look at our Open Liberty guides on Jakarta EE technologies.

Thanks and good night!

Updates:

  • 2019-09-10: Updated list of contributors; updated link to filtered guides list.

  • 2019-09-11: Add link to TCK results.