Surging Interest in Jakarta EE and IoT Drive Recent Spate of New Eclipse Foundation Memberships

What the Eclipse Foundation is describing as a "surge" of interest in both enterprise Java (Jakarta EE) and the activities of the Eclipse IoT community led to a spike in new memberships last month. The standards organization behind 350 open source projects and home of the Eclipse IDE added 16 new member organizations in August to its roster of 275 members.

The list of new members includes Advantest Europe GmbH, Baloise Holding AG, Cirrus Link Solutions, Cloudbees, Codescoop Oy, Fujitsu, iJUG, Inductive Automation, Istanbul JUG, Karakun AG, Kynetics LLC, Liferay, Lightbend, London Java Community, Mettenmeier, Mindus, Mizuho International, Nanjing Glaway, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, RTD Embedded Technologies, Toyota, Tuev Sued Auto Services, Useopen Middleware and V2Com.

The Foundation is focused on creating an environment for successful open source projects, and to promote the adoption of Eclipse technology in commercial and open source solutions.

"Throughout the 14-year history of the Eclipse Foundation, our focus has been on fostering successful open source projects using a member and community-driven process to enable commercial adoption," said Mike Milinkovich, the Foundation's Executive Director, in a statement. "This is one of the most exciting periods in the Foundation's history, particularly as the enterprise Java stack re-imagines itself for cloud-native use cases via Jakarta EE, and as commercial adoption of IoT continues to explode with Eclipse IoT projects at the center of this innovation."

According to Milinkovich, seven of the Foundation's new members said they joined specifically to contribute to the evolution of Jakarta EE, and several expressed interest in participating in the Eclipse IoT Working Group, an industry collaboration of companies that invest and promote an open source community for IoT. Eclipse IoT currently includes more than 40-member companies working on 35 open source projects for IoT devices, gateways, and cloud platforms.

Another draw: the Foundation's new open source governance model and a "cloud native Java" path forward for Jakarta EE, which the organization unveiled in April.

"Ultimately, what we are trying to do here is to take a technology that is approaching its 20th birthday and give it a whole new life," Milinkovich told ADTmag in an earlier interview. "I have to say, when I talk to people, whether it's in person or through the mailing list, there is still an enormous amount of energy and passion in the Java EE community. If we can tap into that and give developers the tools they need on this platform to be successful in this new cloud-native, microservices-centric kind of world, they're going to love what's coming out of the Jakarta EE projects. This is an opportunity for this community to get a whole second generation of technology and momentum, and that's really what we are working very, very hard toward."

Posted by John K. Waters on September 12, 2018