[opencms-dev] OpenCms 22 will support Tomcat 11 / Jakarta EE

[Alex Kandzior]

Dear OpenCms Users,

OpenCms 22, planned for October 2026, will run on Tomcat 11 and Jakarta EE, with a legacy variant so existing installations can follow at their own pace.

If you have followed OpenCms development for a while, you may have wondered when OpenCms would move to Jakarta. That time has come, and the story of why it is now, and not earlier, is mostly a story about dependencies.

Like every mature Java application, OpenCms builds on many external libraries. Over the last years, more and more of them made the move to Jakarta, but two of the biggest did not: Apache Solr, which powers the OpenCms search, and Vaadin, the framework behind the Workplace UI.

Vaadin was the harder case of the two. The OpenCms Workplace is built on a Vaadin version whose open source line ended a few years ago; the final open source releases only support the old servlet API, and after the license change we had given up hope for a properly converted Jakarta version. Replacing Vaadin entirely would mean rewriting large parts of the Workplace, a huge effort that we wanted to avoid.

For a time, waiting was simply the right call. If we are honest, we half hoped the namespace split would eventually blow over. And Jetty 12 gave us a modern, fully supported runtime that can still host javax based applications, so we made it our default.

That picture has changed. With Solr 10, released this March, the last of our major dependencies besides Vaadin completed the switch. And when we took a closer look at today's migration tooling, the Vaadin problem turned out to be solvable too: using a Gradle plugin that builds on the Apache Tomcat Migration Tool for Jakarta EE, we could convert the Vaadin dependencies to the new namespace automatically. With that, the Workplace keeps running on modern servlet containers without a rewrite. From there, the rest of the migration was manageable work. In fact, the biggest part is already behind us: the opencms-core sources have been converted, active development is now Jakarta based, and everything runs as expected.

How the two release variants work, what changes for developers, and the upgrade path towards OpenCms 22 and 23 are covered in the full article on opencms.org:

https://www.opencms.org/en/article/OpenCms-goes-Jakarta

Kind regards,
Alex.

-------------------
Alexander Kandzior

Alkacon Software - The OpenCms Experts                                                    
http://www.alkacon.com - http://www.opencms.org                                                          


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