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The question of whether Eclipse MicroProfile should join or be merged with Jakarta EE has come up several times over the past few weeks as the implications of the Jakarta EE javax renaming question have been discussed.

Related blog post: Liferay's Position Regarding the Jakarta EE Namespace by Neil Griffin.

It should be noted that Eclipse MicroProfile is a completely standalone Eclipse project and is related to Java EE, as it will be one day be to Jakarta EE, in that it's foundation is comprised of several key Java EE specifications. However, one key aspect of Eclipse MicroProfile is incompatible with Jakarta EE and also worth keeping. This aspect is speed of innovation by virtue of it's light weight community-driven, open-source development process; a process not bound by a heavier weight specification process such as Jakarta EE. This allows Eclipse MicroProfile to evolve more quickly and nimbly.

The characteristics of this relationship between Eclipse MicroProfile and Jakarta EE creates a synergistic partnership which can help unlock the potential of each by first providing a fast paced innovation engine backed by a solid enterprise grade specification platform. Whether Eclipse MicroProfile defacto specifications ever graduate to Jakarta EE is neither required nor any indication of the success or failure of this partnership. In fact, Eclipse MicroProfile projects which graduate to Jakarta EE only prove gaps in the enterprise Java ecosystem and those that never graduate prove that enterprise Java is rich enough to be expanded and innovated upon.