Introduction to working on/with Jakarta EE Specifications for WildFly users
By Scott Marlow
| November 10, 2022
Reasons to get involved with the Jakarta EE Specification teams
You are a developer that uses the WildFly (Jakarta EE) application server to create/update applications that meet your users needs. Reason #1 is to participate in developing future Jakarta EE releases. From adding a new feature to a specification, to implementing that new feature. You can also help by adding TCK tests for new features as well.
Whether you contribute a small or large amount of time, every contribution helps!
The more that you participate in the Jakarta EE communities, the more you will understand how Jakarta EE releases are done.
Sign the Eclipse contribution agreement (ECA) when you are ready to contribute a pull request. You will want to sign the ECA with the same email address as the one associated with your github account that you use for creating Jakarta EE pull requests.
Browsing/joining the various Jakarta EE mailing lists
Why join the various Jakarta EE specification mailing lists?
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Participate in discussions about each of the specifications.
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Learn of opportunities to contribute changes to the next Jakarta EE release.
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Be ready to ask questions on the subscribed email lists.
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Jakarta EE Mailing Lists lists all of the mailing lists. Note that each mailing list is archived in a web browsable format.
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Join the Context and Dependency Injection specification discussions.
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Join the Platform TCK discussions and help add/update tests.
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Accessing the specification documents (PDF/HTML) for various specifications
Browse the jakarta.ee page.
The jakarta.ee page contains many useful subpages, such as the specification with all the technology specifications (html/pdf document that describes the specification, javadoc). For example https://jakarta.ee/specifications/persistence/3.1 contains the Jakarta Persistence 3.1 specification documents, JavaDoc, Schema documents, Test Compatibility Kit, Maven coordinates.
Another example, Jakarta RESTful Web Services shows the various releases of Jakarta RESTful Web Services but also note the project button link which shows you interesting information about that project such as the list of committers and who leads the project. The project committers are responsible for reviewing/merging pull requests (e.g. changes) to the Specification repository.
Another important page to note is the Developer Resources page which has the Specification github repository link.
You should fork a few of the various Jakarta EE Specification repositories such as github.com/jakartaee/rest
which contain the source for the Jakarta RESTful Web Services API and SPEC documents. Forking a repository on https://github.com/YOUR_NAME means creating a copy of a repo in your personal github account. You can make EE Specification improvements with your fork and create a pull request for the upstream (original) repo that you forked.
The next blog will give more details about contributing to Jakarta EE and how that can help WildFly + you.
We’d love to hear feedback from you at the WildFly forum, the next blog in this series will try to answer any questions you post in response.
