Is it worth learning Jakarta EE in 2024 or is Spring Boot the only way to go for Java devs?

All answers to this question.

The truth is that they are no longer "rivals" but rather a shared ecosystem. Spring Boot actually uses many Jakarta EE specifications under the hood (like Jakarta Persistence/JPA and Jakarta Validation). If you learn Spring Boot, you are accidentally learning 60% of Jakarta EE. However, if your goal is maximum employability, focus 80% of your effort on Spring Boot. It has a much larger community, more third-party integrations, and faster innovation cycles. Save Jakarta EE for when you specifically land a role in a legacy banking environment that uses application servers like WildFly or GlassFish.

   Answered 2024-10-20 by Mary Bennett

That’s a smart question for a beginner! But have you looked into Micronaut or Quarkus? They are the "third way" that bridges the gap between the two. They use Jakarta annotations but are designed for modern cloud-native environments. Do you think it's better to learn the "concepts" of Dependency Injection and Persistence rather than being tied to a specific framework’s implementation?

   Answered 2024-10-23 by Paul Martinez

• Paul makes a great point about the "concepts." Whether you use @Autowired in Spring or @Inject in Jakarta EE, the underlying architectural pattern is the same. I always tell my juniors: learn the "why" before the "how." If you understand how a Bean lifecycle works, you can switch between Spring and Jakarta in a weekend. However, for a first job, having "Spring Boot" on your resume will get you through the automated HR filters much faster than "Jakarta EE" will.

     Commented 2024-10-24 by Richard Nelson

Spring Boot dominates the market for a reason: the documentation. You can find a solution for any Spring problem on StackOverflow in seconds. Jakarta EE is a bit more sparse.

   Answered 2024-10-26 by Lisa Carter

• So true, Lisa. The developer experience in Spring is just more polished. The "Spring Initializr" alone makes starting a project so much less painful than setting up a Jakarta EE pom.xml.

     Commented 2024-10-28 by Kevin Lewis