back to article Java EE renamed 'Jakarta EE' after Big Red brand spat

The open source version of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) has been renamed Jakarta EE to satisfy Oracle's desire to control the "Java" brand. The renaming became necessary after Oracle moved Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, a shift it hoped would see developers become more engaged with the project. But Oracle wouldn't …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A turd by any other name

    will smell just as shite.

    1. Aitor 1

      Re: A turd by any other name

      I disagree, but I would say that the bells are tolling for Java.

      1. Wulfhaven
        Trollface

        Re: A turd by any other name

        Yes, obviously. It's Jakarta all the way now.

      2. croky

        Re: A turd by any other name

        "Time marches on!"

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Have they cleared the name with the Indonesian Government and/or the city fathers? Or is this a case of the Eclipse Foundation being American and there is no place with that name in the states they think they can use it with impunity.

    1. Randy Hudson

      How is Jakarta any different than Java?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        > "How is Jakarta any different than Java?

        "Well for one thing it's got three more letters.

        1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

          "Well for one thing it's got three more letters.

          Indeed - the verbiage is clearly increasing as time goes by...

    2. Mage Silver badge

      being American and there is no place with that name in the states

      Amazon Inc.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      If you tried, you could probably find a thousand companies named after locations with little to no effort.

    4. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Reminds me of a while ago when lawyers were apparently firing off take down letters to anyone using the name of "Java" in business. The apocryphal story is that there is now a tourist island "formerly known as Java"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      There are tourists to be sure, but check out Java (the island) on Google Earth some time, if you want to see serious population density.

    2. choleric

      That'll be an island with more population than any other island you've ever been to. "Tourist island" is not an accurate label.

  4. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Do-over?

    Java EE is a mixed bag. It got started back in the dark days of "we should replace code with XML" so parts of it are incomprehensible configuration gibberish. It lived through the "abstract the abstractions" darks days so it has factories for factories and objects so completely abstracted that they must claim to do nothing at all. It seems like a lot of "EE" could be frozen for legacy apps and replaced with more modern libraries for new apps. RMI would be a good place to start since microservices are all the rage now.

    1. Wulfhaven
      Mushroom

      Re: Do-over?

      Look into the eyes of the FactoryFactoryManagerManager and despair.

    2. rmullen0

      Re: Do-over?

      Microservices is an even bigger fail than Java EE.

    3. NOTiFY

      Re: Do-over?

      "RMI would be a good place to start since microservices are all the rage now."

      That's where EJB 1.0 came from.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sad times...

    Well, sort off. I still think the Glassfish project, as started by Sun Microsystems, is an impressive one and I also think it's somewhat of a shame to see it go down like this (no offense but I'm not very confident about the outcome). Typical Oracle mindset, let's not call it for what it is because there may still be some money left to squeeze out.

    Oh well, for me these are times long past and in my opinion Apache is the better choice. The Apache HTTP server for the web layer, Apache Tomcat as my servlet container and finally Apache TomEE as the EJB container. The best part (in my opinion) is that because these are three separate processes you basically get a more "real" container separation than when you run the whole kaboodle within Glassfish.

    Now, Glassfish also has very good tools for fine tuning but in my opinion nothing beats having physically separate processes so that you could even apply limitations on the OS level if you wanted to.

    It takes getting used to, especially if you're used to Glassfish, but once you get your fingers behind it you'll soon discover why many Java developers would have preferred to see this project being hosted by the Apache foundation. Time will tell I suppose.

    1. Steve K

      Re: Sad times...

      Payara is based off GlassFish though - www.payara.fish

  6. TrumpSlurp the Troll
    Joke

    I say, I say, I say

    My wife's gone to the East Indies.

    Java?

    No, Jakarta........hang on, I'm sure that's not right......

    1. Soruk
      Joke

      Re: I say, I say, I say

      Jakarta? No, she went willingly.

    2. Steve K

      Re: I say, I say, I say

      Hang on, Alaska?

    3. theshyted

      Re: I say, I say, I say

      Jamaica? Or was it her idea?

    4. Ian Johnston Silver badge

      Re: I say, I say, I say

      My wife's gone to the East Indies.

      Java?

      Twice over the kitchen table before she left.

  7. Marco van de Voort

    For legal reasons

    For legal reason it must be called "Batavia EE" in the Netherlands ( :-) )

  8. Milton

    Do-over

    Kevin McMurtrie wrote: "... It lived through the "abstract the abstractions" darks days so it has factories for factories and objects so completely abstracted that they must claim to do nothing at all ..."

    —and provided a ghastly reminder of some horrifying modern coding habits. I know of people—who were never particularly good coders, but always imagined that they were brilliant—who, if poorly managed (i.e. working for an English-speaking Anglo-Saxon company), would choose to find work they liked rather than what the business really neded to be done. That work would ofttimes be trivial cosmetic stuff that had neither importance nor urgency. Sometimes it would be trivial exercises like writing reports for the business users—which the latter were supposed to be doing themselves already.

    But, when denied these opportunities to squander their (often quite generous) salaries on needless tasks, they would turn to the wealth of make-work offered by Abstraction. A piece of code, an API, a service, some kind of interface, anything at all really, would be targeted for "improvement" and, before you know it, something that had worked perfectly well for months or years would abruptly vanish behind another layer of calls, wrappers, settings, interface addresses, logins, authentications and wotnot. Pompous emails would arrive informing us that such-and-such had been "deprecated" and that a "refactored"¹ or even "new" version must be used (causing 27 other systems to require changes to preserve interoperability), citing mysterious enhancements and improvements which, even if no immediate advantage could be discerned, would make the business ready for whatever IT-BS-phrases would be fashionable next year.

    No useful additional functionality would appear; sometimes it would disappear; new bugs would emerge; everything would now take a little longer, dramatically so if a cluster of witlessly recurring and poorly tested "checks" were included; here and there would be plastered long and important-sounding new names and labels for things; release notes—lacking important, pertinent information—would nonetheless feature the author's name and assorted samples of the current buzzword drivel thus "cloud-enabled", "AI-compatible" with "high-volume messaging potential" and "enhanced security".

    You end up with endless layers of utterly valueless complexity, as abstractions of wrappers conceal layers of indirection of wrappers in thickets hiding jungles of abstractions of code wrapped in wrapstractolayers. Sometimes the only bit that was well-written, after you'd churned through 39,231 lines of wrapping, was the original 207 lines of core code.

    Observing this behaviour (in other people's teams, I promise you) I went through various stages of disbelief, disgust and even anger, but eventually came to understand this by a simple analogy.

    Bad coders, under-tasked, under-trained and under-managed, gravitate to pissing on things ... just like dogs. "Look how important and clever I am: I just peed here!" It really does seem to be that simple. (And explains some other habits of mediocre male coders.)

    ¹ My term for this process, now cautiously adopted by those unfortunate enough to have worked with me, is "refucktoring". As in, "Chris refucktored the code for SystemTwo and now it keeps barfing".

    1. jb99

      Re: Do-over

      And you could never argue against any of this because they were only following "best practice".

      "Don't you want to follow "best practice"? You want to write bad code?..."

      1. Aladdin Sane

        Re: best practice

        If everybody does it, isn't that the same a mediocrity?

    2. HmmmYes

      Re: Do-over

      Ah refactoring. That existed before javascript libraries.

      What you doing?

      Refactoring this application java.

      Why?

      Java will be less code, faster and more code. And easier to maintain.

      Do you have a test framework to check all the functionality?

      No. Itll work.

      ........ 3 years later.......

      The horrors! The bloat. The tortoiselike speed. The crashes and bugs.

  9. Unep Eurobats
    Holmes

    Unsurprising outcome

    The baffling thing is that 35% thought that Enterprise Profile was a good name for it. The phrase makes me think of CRM or biometrics.

    1. Boothy

      Re: Unsurprising outcome

      I saw Enterprise Profile and immediately thought, how is anyone going to do keyword searches with that? Or fit that easily into package names etc?

      If you're creating a new brand name, at least try to make it standout, Enterprise Profile doesn't! How did it even get shortlisted?

      1. Wensleydale Cheese

        Re: Unsurprising outcome

        "If you're creating a new brand name, at least try to make it standout, Enterprise Profile doesn't! How did it even get shortlisted?"

        Chief suspects: those supporting "Jakarta EE".

        1. Jos V

          Re: Unsurprising outcome

          Well, to be honest, if you would know Jakarta a bit, you'd probably know there is a bar called EP in Jakarta.

          Stands for Eastern Promise, but I guess that would be a fitting name too.

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Unsurprising outcome

        When you want to force the use of a particular name which you've already decided on in committee, you give the greater group a choice between the one you want and something or somethings completely unpalatable.

        I'm surprised noone stood up and actually pointed this railroading tactic out.

      3. fedoraman

        Re: Unsurprising outcome

        I refer you to the following quote from "Yes, Prime Minister", on presenting options :-

        Bernard Woolley: "What if he [the Prime Minister] demands options?"

        Sir Humphrey Appleby: "Well, it’s obvious, Bernard. The Foreign Office will happily present him with three options, two of which are, on close inspection, exactly the same."

        Sir Richard Wharton: "Plus a third which is totally unacceptable."

        Sir Humphrey Appleby: "Like bombing Warsaw or invading France."

    2. find users who cut cat tail

      Re: Unsurprising outcome

      Enterprise Profile can be only one thing: Outline of Starship Enterprise (from side).

  10. PaulR79
    Coat

    "The renaming became necessary after Oracle moved Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation, a shift it hoped would see developers become more engaged with the project."

    Nothing says "we support and endorse this" quite like withholding the rights to use the name of the product upon which it's based. In their defense they really do like money.

    Icon = Oracle looking for cash

  11. Admiral Grace Hopper

    Krakatoa East Of Java

    The erroneous film title is still wrong after the name change. If only they'd changed the name to Zanzibar.

    1. Jos V

      Re: Krakatoa East Of Java

      Well, yeah. And no. Krakatoa is more or less the Portuguese spelling of it, and the Indonesian name is Krakatau, but technically if you go far enough east of Java, you would end up at (now anak-)Krakatau. You'd hit Zanzibar before that actually.

      It's not helpful when giving people directions though.

      (Oh, and there is also a Zanzibar in the greater Jakarta region.)

      1. earl grey
        Joke

        Re: Krakatoa East Of Java

        a Zanzibar in the greater Jakarta region

        Home of the Zanzibarbarians.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Did they really vote a year ago?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Jakarta vs Java

    Even the name is now bloated.

  14. rmullen0

    Java is known for overly engineered APIs

    I haven't been doing a lot of Java programming as of late, but, I seem to recall one of my favorite APIs/classes was XMLGregorianCalendar. It didn't have a constructor. You had to use a separate factory to create it. And on top of that the factory method threw a checked exception that occurred if there was a problem with the configuration file. That should have been an unchecked exception because there would be no way to recover from it. Also, does a Gregorian calendar class really need to be pluggable? Never mind, I have no idea why that class should be needed to begin with. It should just use a standard Date class. It seemed ridiculous to me. Java was already starting to have issues keeping up with .NET before Oracle. LINQ for example left Java in the dust. Once Oracle bought out Sun, it hasn't gotten better. I wish that Java EE were more successful than it is. For example JavaServer Faces. It had it's own issues, but, eventually they were mostly sorted out. However, no one seems to use standard anything in the Java world. It is just a potpourri of different open source frameworks/libraries where one developer is doing one thing and another is doing something else. A few other lame things about Java include longstanding issues like memory leaks in commonly used software such as Tomcat. I thought it was ridiculous that that was never fixed. And more recently, Oracle released Java 9. And their own IDE, NetBeans doesn't even support it. It is pathetic.

    1. HmmmYes

      Re: Java is known for overly engineered APIs

      Too many interfaces and frameworks.

      Only chance ypu stand with planning a longlived product is to keep the core api to a minimum.

      Doesnt javva ee ship with 3-4 different gui frameworks?

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What about an anagram?

    Didn't anybody consider an anagram of Java?

    Ajav? Avja? Jaav? Vaja? Vaaj?

    Okay, maybe not the last two...

    1. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
      Angel

      Re: What about an anagram?

      Should have called it Jahova.

    2. Alister

      Re: What about an anagram?

      Vajazzle would be quite apt.

    3. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: What about an anagram?

      Didn't anybody consider an anagram of Java?

      How about Jive?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XxsasUHzaQ

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Really....

    What sort of shitty language depends on some sort of external trademarked name anyway, time to stop all those toy languages and get back to the one true religion C++.

    1. Adrian 4

      Re: Really....

      --

      ftfy

  17. Spudley

    The open source version of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) has been renamed Jakarta EE to satisfy Oracle's desire to control the "Java" brand.

    Remember, kids, this is the same company that sued Google over the use of the Java header files.

    Their desire for complete control should not be a surprise here.

  18. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    They missed a chance there

    Should have called it V'Ger - comes back far more powerful that it left.

    {for some undefined value of 'powerful'}

  19. John Hoar

    The Jakarta name has a loooong association with Java

    Being home to some successful Apache Foundation Java projects such as Xerces and Xalan, some promising but ultimate failures such as Batik and many many things that were simply a bad idea; a lot of Java/XML crossovers. Very mid-2000s.

  20. jelabarre59

    Larry

    They could jave named after Larry Ellison;

    Jerkass EE

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