Hi,
I am chiming in late after sensing that we are not all in sync on what needs to be done for Jakarta EE 11 to be released. I heard this week that some Spec teams are planning for a quick release by September (or so).
As you may know, in order for each individual EE Specification to be released, an implementation of the Specification must be ratified as being compatible by passing the relevant TCK. This includes the Core Profile, Web Profile and Full Platform as well.
IMO, the current plan is to complete the Platform TCK refactoring for EE 11 and that will not be complete until each of the TCKs are proven as being ready enough for release. In support of being `ready enough for release`, we aim to delay adding EE 11 tests until the refactoring is complete so that we can find implementations to test the refactored TCKs against.
Once we reach the point of being able to add EE 11 tests, we will be able to merge EE 11 test additions in from anyone as compared to now where very few people understand the Platform TCK internals enough to add tests.
In 2022, we only spent a brief period of time on TCK refactoring which we have resumed working on. One exception is the Servlet TCK refactoring that Olivier Lamy worked on which is now merged to the
tckrefactor branch. The big question now is when will we finish refactoring the TCK tests? I think it is too early to estimate when we will have completed the EE 11 TCKs + implementations which make it difficult to know when the EE 11 Specification ballots will be completed.
One possible shortcut could be to focus on producing the EE 11 Standalone TCKs first which leaves the Platform TCK to complete last but I do think we need to make progress on the Platform TCK as well, especially on understanding what TCK test vehicles will look like.
For the most part, Standalone TCKs need to continue to support running in Java SE mode unless they require a Full Platform/Web Profile implementation to test against (in which case they are really not a Standalone TCK for which we will wave our hands around on and say use a web container to test the implementation with).
Also, there is no reason why Standalone TCKs cannot be extended by the Platform TCK instead of maintaining multiple copies of the same test classes.
Another reality is that it takes time for SPEC implementations to test refactored TCKs. We will release milestone releases of needed artifacts so that implementations can test refactored TCKs but the big question is when will we see that start to happen and how much time should EE 10 implementations have to test before we start adding EE 11 tests?
Once we start adding EE 11 tests we will lose the ability to validate that the TCK tests are correct until we have EE 11 implementations to test against and even then it is a lot of work to triage each failure as EE 11 implementations will have bugs and the tests may have bugs as well.
Scott
