Today, I released version 2.15.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE project. As is often the case lately, this version contains bug fixes but also a few notable features:

• You can now specify Servlets in WEB-INF/web.xml (as opposed to just via the @WebServlet annotation). This is helpful for defining a Servlet when the actual implementation is in a JAR or when following non-annotation-based examples
• You can now specify context-param values in WEB-INF/web.xml in the NSF and META-INF/web-fragment.xml in JAR design elements, which will be available to JSP, JSF, JAX-RS, @WebServlet-annotated Servlets, and web.xml-defined Servlets
• Added @BooleanStorage annotation for NoSQL entities to define how boolean values are converted to note items
• Added CRUD operations for calendar events to NoSQL, around a few new methods on Repository. This exposes some of the capabilities of NotesCalendar and can be used for, for example, providing an iCalendar feed based on a mail database. To go with that, XPages JEE also re-exports iCal4J as included in the Domino stack for NSF use, though this API is... not smooth

The first two here are focused around bringing NSFs more in line with "normal" Jakarta EE applications, while the latter are some nice improvements for the NoSQL driver. I hope to put the last one in particular to good use - for example, OpenNTF's site will be able to provide a calendar of webinars and other events that we can manage internally using a normal Notes calendar, and that sounds nice to me.

Next Versions

I still have the 3.x branch of the project chugging along, and I think it'll be ready for a real release before too long. Since it'll be a breaking-changes release thanks to upstream changes, I'm using it as an opportunity to consolidate the sprawl of features and XPages Libraries. Currently, my plan is:

• One for "core", covering most things in the Jakarta EE Core Profile, plus the other utility specs I've implemented: Transactions, Bean Validation (which really should be in Core in my estimation), Concurrency, Servlet, and so forth, plus Data and NoSQL
• One for "UI", covering Jakarta Pages, Jakarta Faces, and MVC - basically, the stuff you could use to replace XPages to make an HTML-generating app in your NSF
• One for MicroProfile, or at least the specs I've implemented so far. I'm a little tempted to wrap this in to Core, since things like OpenAPI are useful almost all the time, but it's a clean-enough separation that it'll be fine

This will require Domino 14, since Jakarta EE 10 requires at least Java 11.

That brings me to some unexpected good news: though Jakarta EE 11 was long planned to use Java 21 as its minimum version (since 21 is the current LTS), it looks like they've switched to making Java 17 the baseline. For me, this is a little sad in an idealistic sense, since it pushes things like Virtual Threads out of the realm of being a core part of JEE, but I'm very happy that I'll be able to use all JEE 11 specs in Domino 14. Even if Domino 15 used Java 21, it'd still be a long while before that came, and we'd lag behind the standard for at least a year. Instead, this puts the project back in line with upstream, and allows me personally to potentially resume committing to Jakarta NoSQL - I'd been out of the loop for a very long time when it moved to 11 and then 17 as its required version.

I don't know right now whether JEE 11 will be the same sort of breaking change for the project (which would mean a 4.x release) or if I'll be able to make it a 3.x one - the specs aren't out yet, so time will tell. The big focus of 11 will be further centralization on CDI instead of EJB, and I'm all for it.

My plan is to get 3.x out for Domino 14, based on JEE 10, as soon as time allowed, and then I'll start looking into bumping to JEE 11 when it releases in the summer.