MicroProfile, Jakarta EE, GlassFish/EE4J

[David Blevins]

All,

Moving MicroProfile into the Jakarta EE Working Group and disbanding the MicroProfile Working Group requires a super-majority vote. There are currently four -1 votes and not enough +1 votes to make this happen. Tomitribe, Atlanta JUG and Committer Rep Emerson Castaneda represent 3 of those -1 votes.

We have a proposal we'd like to discuss with the respective communities that would allow the three of us to vote +1, guaranteeing enough votes to move MicroProfile into Jakarta EE.

The Jakarta EE Working Group (WG) charter currently includes GlassFish and other Eclipse implementations within EE4J. The Jakarta EE WG marketing is used to promote and award contributions to GlassFish as contributions to Jakarta EE. The Jakarta EE WG budget is used to fund infrastructure for building GlassFish/EE4J and swag for top GlassFish/EE4J committers. There is currently "Jakarta EE Community Mentor" proposal which will use all Jakarta EE channels to recognize, promote and award contributions to WG projects, including GlassFish/EE4J, excluding other implementations.

While the charter does contain "Provide vendor neutral marketing and other services to the Jakarta EE ecosystem", in practice marketing and budget are provided to GlassFish/EE4J in ways it will not extend to other vendors. The justification is that GlassFish/EE4J are part of the Jakarta EE Working Group and other implementations are not.

Our proposal is to move GlassFish/EE4J into a dedicated Working Group where these activities can happen without compromising the vendor neutrality goal of Jakarta EE. In short:

- Establish an EE4J Working Group and move all implementations out of Jakarta EE
- Move Jakarta EE budget line items associated with implementations (Infra $60k, etc) into EE4J Working Group
- Bootstrap this from the current year Jakarta EE budget as we did to start the MicroProfile Working Group

- Dissolve the MicroProfile Working Group and move all specs to Jakarta EE
- Increase Jakarta EE budget $50k to ensure Eclipse does not lose the $50k MicroProfile Working Group budget
- Revise Jakarta EE charter to remove references to EE4J (PMC representation on Jakarta EE committees would remain intact)
- Add requirement that inclusive vendor-neutral criteria will be established for marketing and other services extended to implementations in the Jakarta EE ecosystem

If there was support for moving GlassFish/EE4J to a separate Working Group, this commitment to neutrality would be applauded and we would vote +1 on moving MicroProfile into Jakarta EE. If all voices come with "why is this so bad" and general pushback, then we do not see value in moving MicroProfile to a Working Group that does not prioritize neutrality.

Would there be support for such a proposal to unite Jakarta EE / MicroProfile in a vendor-neutral Working Group and elevate GlassFish/EE4J into a dedicated Working Group?


-David

[Arjan Tijms]

Hi all,

On Mon, 18 Aug 2025 at 05:36, David Blevins dble...@tomitribe.com wrote:

• Revise Jakarta EE charter to remove references to EE4J (PMC representation on Jakarta EE committees would remain intact)

I agree that any remaining references to EE4J should be removed. Over the past period I’ve worked on separating Jakarta EE–related specifications from EE4J and placing them directly under Jakarta EE. Examples include the Concurrency RI, JSP RI, and EL RI, which were previously coupled with implementation projects. These have since been rebranded (e.g., Concurro, WaSP, and Expressly) to emphasize that they are not more “special” than any other implementation.

The Jakarta EE tutorial has also been moved, though the examples it references still need to follow. The status of the starter project (https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/starter) may also warrant discussion, as it arguably fits better under Jakarta EE than EE4J.

Maintaining vendor neutrality is important for Jakarta EE, and I fully support that principle.

On a related note, it would be valuable to have a complete set of Jakarta EE 11+ TCK runners for implementations such as WildFly, Liberty, and TomEE as part of the Jakarta EE TCK project. This would allow users to easily execute the TCK—or subsets of it—against any implementation for comparison and additional validation.

The GlassFish team has invested significant effort in making our TCK runners broadly available, enabling straightforward validation and serving as a reference for implementers. While we also encounter challenges, it is not always easy for us to benefit from similar guidance provided by others.

Kind regards,
Arjan Tijms

[Emily Jiang]

Hi David,

Moving GlassFish out of Jakarta EE to maintain fair competition and implementation neutrality is a great idea. GlassFish was the only choice for the rectification implementation in the past due to optional features and specification. Now we have fixed that. There are many other candidates for rectification. We have been trying to move out other specification implementations out of Jakarta EE as Arjan mentioned. I also prefer Jakarta EE focuses on API, Spec and TCKs. Other related projects should be outside Jakarta EE. 

As for setting up a working group, I am with Steve and Kenji so I personally do not think it is necessary as setting up and maintaining a healthy working group is not a small thing. There are many implementation projects under Eclipse Foundation and they work fine. I don't see a reason why GlassFish is different. I assume the current contributors would continue their contributions.

Thanks,

Emily

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Thanks
Emily

[Ondro Mihályi]

Hi David, above all that was already mentioned by others, I want to say on behalf of the whole OmniFish company that we agree with splitting EE4J out from the Jakarta EE Working group. Moving EE4J into a new working group doesn't seem to be necessary, it could become just a top-level project if it already isn't one, and projects inside can evolve as regular Eclipse Foundation projects even without a working group.

Without going into details, I just mention that I believe that GlassFish and other projects in the EE4J space no longer receive marketing endorsement or special resources from Jakarta EE. And if they do, it's certainly not because it's intended but for historical reasons. There's an effort in progress to remove all dependencies between EE4J and Jakarta EE, although some dependencies still exist and it takes time and effort to remove them. In some cases, it's not even possible to completely remove some dependencies, but it's possible to allow other implementations outside of EE4J to be treated in the same way. The Platform TCK needs to be tested against some implementation, and, so far, only the GlassFish project offered help with that. If there are more implementations that offer help and could be used for testing the TCK in the future, it's only a good thing for the whole Jakarta EE ecosystem. On the individual specifications level it's already happening, and some specifications even have the main implementation outside of EE4J, e.g. Jakarta Data has Hibernate, or Jakarta Core Profile has OpenLiberty.and WildFly.

It only makes sense to continue removing the dependencies between EE4J and Jakarta EE WG. If that's a requirement for MicroProfile to agree to moving to Jakarta EE, then MicroProfile needs to wait until all is ready. Though I'm not sure it's worth the delay since Jakarta EE is already moving in the requested direction, based on its own internal motivations. If we delay moving MicroProfile to Jakarta EE for too long, we risk that a lot of work on MicroProfile and Jakarta EE specifications will get stuck in a limbo, waiting until all this is sorted.

All the best,

Ondro Mihalyi

Director, Jakarta EE expert

OmniFish - Jakarta EE Consulting & Support | www.omnifish.ee

Omnifish OÜ, Narva mnt 5, 10117 Tallinn, Estonia | VAT: EE102487932

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[Kito D. Mann]

I'm not invested or knowledgable enough about the nuances here to have a strong opinion, but I will say that limbo is something we want to avoid. I'm afraid this topic is already having that effect...

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[Scott Stark]

I fully agree with removing the EE4j implementations as manifest
elements of the Jakarta EE WG, and merging the EE/MP WGs.

I don't see a need for a new working group to deal with this
separation as these are open source projects that can live within the
existing Eclipse Foundation development process.

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[David Blevins]

Hello communities,

Thank you for the responses. As the discussion has been so far overwhelmingly in favor, I've drafted a potential charter update for continued discussion:

- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wvxSxoAx80XVMfCr9nqyqj4V9_NC_wVSfQp5fgjsgFI/edit?usp=sharing

All thoughts welcome.


-David

[John Clingan]

I also think that it doesn't need a working group. Seems pretty heavyweight.