On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 1:15 PM Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org> wrote:
> Hi all, > > A frequent topic of discussion at ApacheCon EU was Jakarta EE 9. For those > of you who aren't familiar with Jakarta EE the key points are: > > - Oracle have donated Java EE to Eclipse > - Eclipse have released Jakarta EE 8 which is essentially identical to > Java EE 8 > - Oracle have refused to allow changes to the APIs in the javax namespace > - The Jakarta EE community seem to be reaching consensus on releasing > Jakarta EE 9 which will rename all the Java packages from javax.* to > jakarta.* > - Jakarta EE 9 will not contain any other API changes > - It will be a requirement to maintain backwards comparability (maybe not > 100% compatibility) with Jakarta EE 8 > - Jakarta EE 9 will be released in the next ~11 months > - Jakarta EE 10 will then follow which is where new features will be > introduced > > This raises various questions for the Tomcat community including: > > 1. Do we implement Jakarta EE 9? > > Assuming yes to q1. > +0.1 > > 2. As Tomcat 10 or some other version? > I'm not convinced yet by using 10 for that since EE 9 is functionally equivalent. > > 3. How do we manage development (in a branch, as master, ...)? > I would say master. > > 4. How do we implement backwards compatability? Runtime, deploy time, > compilation time? > I have no idea how this would realistically be achieved at the moment. To run on jakarta, the most problematic are libraries and frameworks and it seems difficult to me to think it is really possible to hack our way in at runtime. Deployment, I don't know, so you seem to believe BCEL is a possibility. > > 5. At what point do we EOL Tomcat 7? (since Jakarta EE 9 is just a package > renaming?) > We should mandate that, except for the jakarta package rename changes and/or functionality, all commits to that master should be backported to 9.0 (no exceptions). Keeping 7 is possible, but it means more work. > > 6. Do we commit to supporting Tomcat 9 for an extended period? (to provide > a version that supports java.* directly) > I would be in favor of that as a mirror of that new branch, since it would be hard to guarantee zero issues for "legacy" javax.* webapps, which will basically continue to exist forever. > > I'm posting this to users@ as how Tomcat users want to use and adopt > Jakarta EE 9 is likely to be the biggest driving factor in choosing answers > to these questions. > > We don't have to have all of the answers right now. I think we do need > answers for 1 & 3 so we can start. A few options and 'wait and see' is > likely good enough for the rest for now. > > I have my own views on the answers but I have tried not to express them > here so we can get as wide a discussion as possible. > > Thoughts? > Rémy
