Support for Jakarta EE 9 (annotations and interfaces in jakarta.* namespace)

[zenbones]

What is the timing for the switch to the jakarta.* namespaced dependencies in JEE9? Is there a version I can use or build that's made that change?

[jhoeller]

We have no immediate plans to make such a switch, and also no plans for an early access branch. Our upcoming Spring Framework 5.3 generation will be compatible with Java 8+ and based on the javax-namespaced EE 8 APIs still, for immediate use in current production environments. Beyond that, Spring Framework 6 is likely to adopt the jakarta namespace at a later point.

The jakarta-namespaced APIs are not final yet and we expect a long time to go by before all major providers support them in production releases. We not only need Tomcat, Jetty and Undertow but also EclipseLink, Hibernate ORM and Hibernate Validator to provide major releases here, plus several special-purpose providers and libraries, before we can consider a version of Spring based on jakarta-namespaced APIs. Since there is no relevant value add in EE 9's namespace change per se, backwards compatibility with existing application servers and persistence providers through the javax namespace is more important to us.

That said, if you have a production-targeting stack scenario where our continued use of the javax namespace is an issue, please elaborate. We are aware that the upcoming Tomcat 10 cannot be supported quite yet and recommend sticking with Tomcat 9.0.x (which is feature-equivalent with Tomcat 10, just still based on the javax namespace) for the time being.