What was originally planned for a full GA release of Jakarta EE 11 in July 2024, only the Core Profile and the Web Profile were delivered in December 2024 and April 2025, respectively. And now, 34 months after the release of Jakarta EE 10, the Eclipse Foundation has formally announced the release of Jakarta EE 11 that includes the Jakarta EE 11 Platform. While this may have characterized this as “just another significant delay,” there were practical reasons for it.
By May 2024, after all the 16 updated specifications targeting Jakarta EE 11 passed their respective reviews and TCKs, the Jakarta EE Working Group decided to focus on the long overdue modernizing and restructuring of the antiquated Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). This work primarily focused on migrations of build tools and test suites, namely: Ant to Maven; and TestHarness to Arquillian. OpenRewrite, an open-source automated refactoring ecosystem for source code, was used for this purpose. Benefits for having made this investment include improved compatibility testing and lowering the barrier for adding more tests as the Jakarta EE ecosystem grows and evolves.
The Jakarta EE 11 Platform defines a standard platform for hosting all Jakarta EE applications. It is designed for developers who require the full set of Jakarta EE specifications for developing enterprise applications. Specifications included in the Platform are shown in the diagram below.
The Jakarta EE 11 Web Profile defines a subset of the Jakarta EE Platform that contains web technologies specifically targeted for developing web applications. Specifications included in the Web Profile are shown in the diagram below.
The Web Profile was released in April 2025 with Eclipse GlassFish 8.0.0-M11 serving as the ratifying compatible implementation.
The Jakarta EE 11 Core Profile, introduced in Jakarta EE 10, defines a subset of the Jakarta EE Platform specifications targeting smaller runtimes suitable for microservices and ahead-of-time compilation. It is focused on providing a minimal basis for cloud native runtimes, including runtimes that support build-time applications. Specifications included in the Core Profile are shown in the diagram below.
With only seven specifications, the Core Profile was the first to be released in December 2024 due to its relatively small size. WildFly Preview 34.0.0 and Open Liberty 2024.0.0.11-beta submitted their Compatibility Certification Requests in late October 2024 to certify as compatible implementations of the Core Profile.
As shown in the diagrams above, 16 of the 42 specifications in the Jakarta EE ecosystem have been updated for Jakarta EE 11. Note that there were name changes on two of the specifications, namely: Jakarta Validation (formerly Jakarta Bean Validation); and Jakarta Pages (formerly Jakarta Server Pages). Jakarta Server Faces was renamed to Jakarta Faces with the release of Jakarta EE 10.
Jakarta Data 1.0, a new specification for the Jakarta EE 11 Platform and Web Profile, provides an API that allows easy access to database technologies. It can split the persistence from the model with several features, such as the ability to compose custom query methods on a Repository interface where the framework will implement it. The current implementations for Jakarta Data are Hibernate ORM 6.6.0, Eclipse JNoSQL 1.1.4 and Open Liberty 24.0.0.6.
Other notable changes in Jakarta EE 11 include:
Ed Burns, Principal Architect for Java at Microsoft and Release Coordinator for Jakarta EE 11, reflecting on the efforts of the Jakarta EE working group, told InfoQ:
Our field of enterprise software development is at a critical juncture. Generative AI has created expectations for dramatically increased product development velocity. These expectations directly challenge the deliberate, standards based, and, yes, slow, pace of development to which we are accustomed in Jakarta EE.
Though the release of Jakarta EE 11 arrived far later than I would have liked, it does demonstrate two important ways in which we are setting ourselves up to move faster.
- Proof that net-new technologies can be added to the standard and bring value.
- Completing the largest technical debt pay-down in Jakarta EE history.
For 1, Jakarta Data is standards at their best: take proven lessons from elsewhere and bring them to the widest audience possible, without trapping the value in any one single vendor.
For 2, the Jakarta EE TCK has been re-platformed on current testing technology, removing a critical dependency on a testing technology that hasn’t been maintained since before JUnit entered widespread use.
Jakarta EE 11 brings many other values, but those are more incremental, and, frankly, very appropriate for a technology that stands for stability and IT investment preservation.
In March 2023, Steve Millidge, CEO at Payara, described how Jakarta EE 11 could be “the first big leap for Jakarta,” writing:
From the initial lift and shift [Jakarta EE 8] to the new namespace change in Jakarta EE 9, to the simplification work done in Jakarta EE 10, a lot of effort has gone into making Jakarta EE a solid basis for open source developers to build on.
With that done, there’s now the opportunity to start taking Jakarta EE beyond the Java EE era. With Java 21 on the horizon, there’s now the opportunity to make sure Jakarta EE is always leveraging the latest and greatest capabilities of the new Java version, build new specifications and further unify and simplify the platform.
For Jakarta EE 11, with one new specification and a fresh new TCK, Millidge’s thoughts from over two years ago seem to have come to fruition.
More details on the new features of Jakarta EE 11 may be found in this Eclipse Foundation blog post by Tanja Obradovic, Jakarta EE Program Manager at the Eclipse Foundation.
Editor’s Notes
Michael Redlich serves as a committer on the Jakarta Data specification. The Jakarta EE 11 profile images are courtesy of the Eclipse Foundation.
