Eclipse Foundation Paperwork
Firstly, please make sure to sign the Eclipse Contributor Agreement. All you need in order to be an effective contributor to Jakarta EE 9 is sign the ECA, that’s it. You will be able to just complete it as an individual without any signatures from your employer. You don’t need to pay anything either. You will likely need some paperwork from your employer if you want to be a committer instead of a contributor. Being a committer typically comes much later and something you don’t need to worry about right away.
If you have any questions on this, please let us know. For further reference, feel free to read this blog post by Wayne Beaton, director of open source projects at the Eclipse Foundation. Most of it is focused on the process to become a committer. There is also a FAQ on the ECA.
General Jakarta EE 9 Information
For background, you should understand a bit of what Jakarta EE 9 is supposed to be. In a sentence, it is primarily focused on moving from the javax to the jakarta namespace. For more details, you should take a look at the Jakarta EE 9 release plan. There is also a FAQ on the release plan.
Moving over each specification means converting over the specification document, changing the API, updating the technology compatibility kit (TCK) and updating at least one compatible implementation (probably Eclipse GlassFish). You can help do all that as a contributor, but you don’t have to do it all at once – you can take one small step at a time.
Converting Specification Documents
One of the easiest things you can help do is converting over the specification documents. This is a great task for contributors just beginning.
Here is a very good guide for converting Java EE specification documents to Jakarta EE.
Markus Karg and Arjan Tijms have been looking for people to help convert over specification documents. They were part of a helpful video that offers details on what this means. There is no need to watch the full video. Markus and Arjan are only on the first portion of the video. However, if you want to learn more about what is going on with Jakarta EE 9 generally, watching the full video is useful. Here is a shorter video on how to convert over specification documents with JAX-RS as an example.
Once you briefly look over these resources you should determine which specifications you want to work on. Here are all the projects – it should be fairly clear what the specification projects are. Next you want to get on the mailing list for the specifications that interest you, announce yourself and let the committers know that you want to help with Jakarta EE 9. In the least there will be a Jakarta EE Ambassador there to help you. If you do not get a response in a timely fashion, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
Feedback on Specifications
Another easy bit of work to get started is simply providing feedback on specifications that are ready for it. For example, Otavio Santana is looking for people to try out Jakarta NoSQL and provide feedback. This is a good way to begin learning and generally get involved in Jakarta NoSQL. This isn’t going to be part of Jakarta EE 9, but it’s important for getting new features into Jakarta EE 10 and beyond.
You can join the mailing list. There are several specification documents you can read. Feel free to try things out, look at the source code and also open PRs or issues.
As we learn of other projects that are in a state that they are ready for feedback, we will keep this document up-to-date. In general, this is more likely to happen in a few months.
Jakarta EE Ambassadors 