Will this project ever support EE9 / jakarata servlet specs?

[darmbrust]

I'm maintaining a project that was developed using JRuby and rack - deployed onto tomcat.

With the latest break-the-world change:
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/14216-jakarta-ee-9-released.html
This project is now useless for Tomcat 10, and beyond.

Is this project dead / will never support the servlet specification rename?

Or is there a better / newer way to take JRuby code and build a war that will run in Tomcat 10?

[mjansing]

Any updates on this? It would be great to have a statement from the maintainers to get the current status of this project.

[nicksieger]

Hi @darmbrust @mjansing! I'm a former maintainer, so I don't have the full context of the current state of the project. To me it looks like the project has kind of been in maintenance mode the past few years, with only activity happening on the 1.1-stable branch. Back when I was working on the project, I was also supporting an application deployed with jruby-rack and the contributions showed that. Truthfully, it's always been a community-maintained project with spurts of contributions from folks who were using it in their own applications. I hope that can still be the case.

All this to say that I think we'll need some people who have current, recent applications to take some initiative and try to see if they can contribute some changes to work with the new jakarta ee spec. I'm willing to spend some time with volunteers and help talk through what the necessary changes might be. (Ironically, @mjansing, your comment is what alerted me to discover that there's a new, breaking change in the new spec! That shows how long I've been away from Java EE development.)

I'm hoping @headius @enebo @kares and other recent contributors might have some ideas here too.

[headius]

We would definitely like to keep this project going, but with only two of us full-time on JRuby work these days it is hard enough to keep up with JRuby proper. Both jruby-rack and the warbler packager need updates for jakarta and more recent JRuby and Java updates. There's also a lot that could be improved in performance and compatibility of the rack layer.

[kares]

Hey, I was maintaining the project for a while after Nick.
All work I did was in my "free time", as I did not manage to find a company that would care supporting the project despite a few of those I helped around actually used it.

Master was meant to be a new minor 1.2 with better performance, as well as extra features requested - e.g. being able to map Ruby logger levels to Java ones, unfortunately this never materialized.

This project is now useless for Tomcat 10, and beyond.

It's fairly straightforward for anyone in a need to do so (it will "just" take time) and we're happy to help - basically doing the renames and testing against new versions. The annoying thing about the package renames is that there would be 2 versions for a while since Tomcat 9 (JavaEE 8) is still supported - any feature work would effectively need to be replicated on two branches.

If anyone is interested please drop by the JRuby matrix room, we can chat about the possibilities and ideas - for a more constructive conversation than simply commenting "same issue" ...