A short story in reply to Reza Rahman’s tweet What Jakarta EE and MicroProfile alignment do you prefer most?.


It was a warm Winter’s day in 2061. I was browsing the social networks on my holo-mobile, when a young woman entered the room and glimpsed over my shoulder.

“Twitter, are you kidding? Gramps, you are so retro. Start using MindDump already!”

That was my granddaughter. She was clever, cheeky, and could speak in italics.

“I will never, ever again use a neuro interface. Hearing other people’s voices in my head makes me feel like a Borg. Or Elon.”

“What’s a Borg? Sounds Swedish.”

“Never mind. Twitter may be ancient, but it still serves its purpose. Look, a new version of Jakarta EE has been released today.”

“That’s cool. I heard of some of the upcoming Jakarta Micro features in one of my Cloud Computing classes.”

“Speaking of ancient - did you know that Micro and Jakarta were separate projects many, many years ago?”

“Really? How come?”

“In the advent of Micro, Jakarta EE - or its predecessor, Java EE - was moving forward rather slowly. So the Mics decided they could make better progress with their own project. This way, they could even introduce frequent breaking changes in their early releases.”

“The Mics… are you sure they were called like that?”

“Absolutely. And the others were the Jaks. I even wrote a blog post about it 40 years ago.”

“So what happened then? Did the Mics move one spec after the other over to the Jaks as soon as it had become stable enough?”

“That’s the problem they ran into after some time. They realized that migrating specs from one project to the other was quite cumbersome for everybody involved. For instance, nobody wanted namespace changes to become part of normal evolution.”

“No more migrations!”

“I see they are teaching you the basics correctly.”

“I was just citing the inscription from the statue standing in front of our University. Some old guy sitting in an airplane.”

“His name is Adam Bien. Besides, why surrender mature specs to the other side after helping them grow up? So now the Mics had both mature and fresh specs under their hood, just as if they had joined the Jaks in the first place.”

“I don’t get why this was perceived as a problem. A new version of Jakarta EE is released every six months, there is an explicit maturity rating for every contained module, different certifiable profiles for different use cases, and everyone is happy.”

“These were the early days of Jakarta EE, and they were still evolving their processes. But as soon as they managed to take on speed without sacrificing stability, the Jaks agreed with the Mics that they could now move forward together. In the long run, merging has made them stronger together, and reduced redundancies and overhead. After that, they were called the MicJaks.”

“Start Me Up!”

“You can be quite retro, too.”

“Okay, enough history lessons for today. You still have to congratulate me!”

“On what?”

“If you were using MindDump, you’d know already. I’ve signed the contract for my first real job!”

“That’s great! What’s the description?”

“Spring Boot developer.”

…

And of course, this is the moment in this kind of stories where the narrator wakes up with a start, drenched in sweat.

The future is ours to shape. And it’s usually better together.

PS to the Spring people and Elon: No offense intended, just kidding ;)