Attracting and educating new developers about Jakarta EE

[TanjaObradovic]

We want to attract new developers to learn about Jakarta EE, to use it and finally to get involved in being part of our contributor / committer community as well. This is an invitation you to share your input and ideas on how to do this. If you have an idea, and you are interested in this area please send a proposal on how you would execute it?

[emecas]

I'm wondering if there are any plans to make project documents available in multiple languages. This would be a great way to reach a wider audience and make the project more accessible.

Project documents like: Jakarta EE plans, Objective reports, Program plan and other kind of documentation as: code examples, tutorials, posts, etc. This would make them more accessible to a wider audience and help to promote the project to a global community.

Inspired by our work on the MicroProfile project and powered from the community:

• Here, a comment compiling a summary for the translation efforts during 2023 for the MicroProfile 6.0 Release in German , Russian , Spanish , Japanese , and Swedish , including: presentations, blog posts, tweets:

  Grow MicroProfile community microprofile/microprofile-wg#151 (comment)

• Here, a summary for the Program Plan for 2022 , Prospectus Document, and MicroProfile 5.0 Release announcement translations efforts to Spanish and Russian

  Evaluate Program Plan translations (Localization) ex. Spanish microprofile/microprofile-wg#153 (comment)

• Here, some early initiatives during 2021 for translating MP Product Plan 2021 and Prospectus document into Russian and Spanish:

  [MP Product Plan] 2021 MicroProfile Program Plan Slide Deck - Russian Version microprofile/microprofile-wg#47
  [MP Product Plan] 2021 MicroProfile Program Plan Slide Deck - Russian Version eclipse/microprofile-marketing#453
  Prospectus document - Spanish Version microprofile/microprofile-wg#73
  Awareness of the Spanish Plan version via MP Twitter microprofile/microprofile-wg#72

I'm available to help formalizing and executing the proposal if you think it's something that would be well-received by the community. If you think it's a worthwhile project and I can contribute to its success please let me know!!

[dearrudam]

Hi @emecas and @TanjaObradovic ! I'm interested in helping with Portuguese translation!!!

[TanjaObradovic]

First of all I will invite MKT committee to review all your suggestions.

There are continuous efforts in Jakarta EE community with translations as well as creating new content. You may or many not be aware of continuous Chinese (https://jakarta.ee/zh/) and Japanese translations of our technical material. A lot of effort and work is already put into this. In terms of translating WG plans and reports, again, suggestion noted but I believe the will not attract new developers to use the technology.

My request does not have much to do with existing material translations, or even promotions of the working group activities (plans and reports) my request is how do we get attention of new java developers - do we maybe approach educational institutions, classrooms, meet-ups, or any other way where we can expose new and young developers to Jakarta EE, do we organize hackathons, workshops. Are any of you doing something similar already? If you have suggestions along those lines, please share.

[TanjaObradovic]

Thanks both @emecas and @dearrudam!!
I will raise your availability and interest to work on translations - please keep in mind our focus is technical material first of all - so they can count on you!

[OndroMih]

I think that more easy to follow guides would help new developers to get started and be productive. E.g., for developers coming from Javascript, it’s natural to work with JSON. They would appreciates guides about using JSON with Jakarta EE in a simple and productive way. Same for REST, messaging, DB access, etc. There’s a lot of info like this scattered over the internet, also in the EE tutorial, but not easy to find simple guides and examples.

[OndroMih]

It would be good to have guides and examples also for non-Jakarta EE technologies that are popular. For example, using Kafka with Jakarta EE, or using MongoDB with EE, etc. Just to get people started. I’m afraid that new developers expect to find information easily and if they don’t have a guide to use their popular tool, they start looking somewhere else.

[OndroMih]

Also, better documentation would be good for universities so that they can reuse the resources and build upon them in their courses. Then we could ask them to contribute to the docs to improve them.

Working more closely with Jav teachers could be beneficial. I heard some teachers say that, even if Jakarta EE and runtimes like Quarkus are now better and easier to use, they still teach Spring because it’s more widely used and more popular, or they rather teach Python because it’s easier to learn by their students. If we eork more closely with them, we could persuade them to teach Jakarta EE and also provide feedback on what to improve to make it easier for them to tesch it.

[kito99]

@OndroMih with regards to documentation we have a new Jakarta EE Documentation (https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/ee4j.jakartaee-documentation) project now. Even thought the initial focus is on the tutorial, it's a good place from which we can launch other initiatives, such as guides.

Also, I have heard there is an emerging trend on TikTok with tech videos. Getting younger influencers on there would probably help a lot. That goes for videos in general because younger devs prefer videos (for some strange reason!)

[Jaawn]

I see that this was opened several months ago, and I'm not sure if this is exactly the right context for this, but in case it is helpful: there are 2 main barriers I run into when trying to explain the benefits of Jakarta EE to both new developers and seasoned developers who haven't used it before.

1. Lack of "cool" examples to point to of Jakarta EE being used "in the wild". Demos are nice, but it carries more weight if you can point to a company/project/etc... that people have heard of and show that Jakarta EE APIs were used to build something interesting. I'm sure there are some good examples out there, but I rarely hear about them. I think people often see Jakarta EE specs as a "behind the scenes" kind of thing. Maybe it'd help to gather some testimonials from well-known companies and projects that basically say "yeah we use Jakarta EE to do x, y, z, because ..." or even create some content around it and then surface it through short, attractive, accessible messaging across many platforms/contexts.
2. Lack of cohesive, unified messaging that puts practical answers to "Why use Jakarta EE?" front and center with quick examples and clear, pragmatic language that avoids jargon or too many abstractions. For example, the "Why Jakarta EE?" page explains all the key benefits, but it is very much a high-level "tell" style of communication instead of "show" communication. It explains the benefits with a lot of words and no real visual aids or examples. Similarly, the video "Why choose Jakarta EE?" is suited for a corporate audience, but I imagine it does not resonate well with many younger or non-corporate developers who may lack the context needed to understand the concepts presented or why they should care about any of the features/benefits mentioned. I can see them thinking "I still don't see what the point is" after watching it.

A lot of the existing content talks about Jakarta EE being vendor neutral, flexible, etc... as if those ideas are self-evident. That is fine for some audiences, but I think for developers new to Jakarta EE it'd help to focus on succinctly answering questions like...

1. "What is something cool I could make with Jakarta EE right now?"
2. "What's so great about spec-driven development and Jakarta EE?"
3. "Why should I care about vendor 'lock-in'?"
4. "What makes the Jakarta EE approach different?"
   or even...
5. "What is a 'specification' anyway, and why should I care?"

Having easily accessible content that is straight to the point and answers these kinds of questions quickly and visually would help with getting people to seek out more information when they haven't heard of Jakarta EE before (and of course it would be important that this is all easy for people to find, stumble upon, and share).