News

MicroProfile 5.0 Released with Updated Jakarta EE 9.1 Dependencies

• By John K. Waters
• February 8, 2022

The latest release of the Eclipse Foundation's MicroProfile, the recently announced MicroProfile 5.0, comes with a number of bug fixes and feature updates, but the change with the greatest impact is its alignment with every specification in the latest version of the foundation's enterprise Java spec, Jakarta EE 9.1.

The MicroProfile specification comprises a collection of enterprise Java APIs and technologies that together form a core baseline for microservices. The latest update of the MicroProfile spec makes it possible to use those APIs with Jakarta EE 9.1, but updating dependencies from the javax.* namespace to the jakarta.* namespace introduces incompatible changes.

Jakarta EE 9.1 was the first incremental release of the open-source enterprise Java platform since version 9.0 was announced in December 2020. (Our coverage of that release here.) That milestone release moved enterprise Java fully to the jakarta.*  namespace. Nicknamed "The Big Bang," the move established Jakarta EE 9 as "a foundation on which cloud-era innovations can be built for future Java infrastructure," the Foundation said at the time.

The Eclipse Foundation employs its "release train" synchronized launch model for MicroProfile releases. Three platform releases are planned for each year in February, June, and October. MicroProfile components that are ready and have been approved for inclusion will be part of the platform release.

This release also includes a number of overall stability and usability improvements. And it "lays the foundation for the rapid innovation of MicroProfile APIs for its 2022 releases," the foundation has said. The MicroProfile project aims to iterate and innovate in short cycles; to propose new common APIs and functionality; and to get community approval, release, and repeat, the foundation states on its website.  

This is, in fact, a major release that includes the following updates:

• MicroProfile Config 3.0
• MicroProfile Health 4.0
• MicroProfile Fault Tolerance 4.0
• MicroProfile JWT RBAC 2.0
• MicroProfile Metrics 4.0
• MicroProfile OpenAPI 3.0
• MicroProfile OpenTracing 3.0
• MicroProfile Rest Client 3.0

Organized as an Eclipse Foundation Working Group, MicroProfile is an open-source initiative focused on creating the specs, APIs, and technology compatibility kits (TCKs) for Java runtimes that enable the development, deployment, and management of cloud-native microservices. The project is driven by a community of individual members, organizations, and vendors collaborating within an open-source Eclipse Foundation Working Group. The spec, which is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, provides Java developers with a platform on which they can collaborate and innovate on areas of common interest.

The list of corporate members in Working Group includes, Oracle, IBM, Fujitsu, TomiTribe, Jelastic, Red Hat, and Payara, among others.