I already wrote about the work we, IBM and Oracle have been doing together to move Java EE to a foundation. At the time I couldn't say which foundation but now we know it's Eclipse and that the project will be called Eclipse Enterprise For Java (EE4J). There's a draft charter and it's vitally important that interested people read it and give feedback on the mailing list. There's a lot of pent-up passion and energy around Java EE and it would be so much better if individuals focussed that on the charter at this point than complaining about the name. Yes, I understand that some people feel the name is important to the success of this effort but I can tell you all that there's a lot more to choosing a name for a foundation or massively successful project than just ... choosing the name. Having done this when we renamed JBossAS to WildFly, you've got to do trademark searches, domain checks, legal verifications etc. and of course that the name or acronym doesn't mean something inappropriate in a different language. So getting to a name like EE4J isn't easy and changing it now is simply not going to be possible. Plus you can never please everyone all of the time.

There's a lot to do over the coming weeks and months. Moving the TCKs, specs and sources to the Eclipse Foundation is probably the easiest of the tasks, which isn't to suggest it's going to be easy. We've got to figure out the processes around which EE4J evolves, who leads the specifications, what about compatibility, evangelism, how does the JCP fit in, etc? And it's going to succeed or fail based upon the engagement of the entire Java (EE) communities. If you're invested in Java EE or anything related to it (yes, including Eclipse MicroProfile) then it's a great opportunity to step up and help drive this in an open manner. Gone are the cries of "this is dominated by Sun/Oracle" and "it's not open source". This is now an Eclipse Foundation effort and the best way to ensure this evolves in a direction with which you agree is to join and get involved!

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has helped so far, obviously including Oracle and IBM. We've just completed the JCP Executive Committee F2F which always precedes JavaOne and the feedback from there when EE4J was presented was positive. Yes there are still a lot of unknowns, many of which I've mentioned above. But generally everyone thought this was a good thing!

Onward!