Loading...There was a lot of eager and nervous anticipation from the Java developer committee about the release of Java Enterprise Edition 6. The focus of the nervousness has been Oracle's acquisition of Sun in April and how it would impact the future of Java. Java EE6 was finally released on December 10th but questions on the impact of Oracle buyout remain unanswered.
The key points made on this release are:
* Glassfish V3 is the reference implementation for EE6
* Java EE6 builds on the persistence and annotation features of EE5.
* This release is about right sizing:
Profiles:
In this release Sun introduces the concept of profiles. Instead of providing a single programming framework that may be used to build different architectures for different industry segments, this release will contain industry specific profiles.
Profiles may be licensed or created based on need. They will incorporate multiple technologies and will cater to different needs. The current release of EE6 contains a full profile and a web profile.
The web profile according to sun will be used to build 'modern apps' and will include security, transaction management and persistence tools. It includes a generic or 'plain vanilla api'.
The new technologies will include the following:
* Java Servlet 3.0
* EJB(Enterprise Java Beans) light 3.1
* Java Persistence Architecture 2.0
* JSP(Java Server Pages) 2.2
* Java Standard Template Library 1.2
* Java Transaction API 1.1
* Debugging for other languages(JSR 4.5)
* There is a lot of pruning of functionality in an effort to keep it light weight.
- The JSR-RPC modules had a lot of UDDI(Universal Data Discovery Functionality) functionality to discover web services. This has been pruned as it is clear now that industry is not heading that way.
In EJB 3.1, Container managed persistence beans are now replaced with the Java persistence API
This was done, according to Sun to keep the API simple and also have Java developers use a single standard API.
* Another goal of this release is to embrace open source frameworks.
* Another new feature introduced in Java EE6 is Webbeans to unify JSF, JPA and EJB 3.0 into a single unified platform.
* Zero configuration drag and drop web frameworks,
* Plugin library jars using web fragment: Here one may setup a framework and bootstrap it into a container. It is a mechanism to integrate 3rd party frameworks into a container. It is used in Glassfish v3.
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* More use of extensions:
* EE6 will increase the use of extensions from EE5. It will eliminate the use of the deployment descriptor. Further the deployment descriptor has been eliminated and the @WebServices annotation is used instead.
* Another feature is the ability to package the ejb inside the war file. The old jar file is still supported.
Related Links
Java EE6 technologies
Rod Johnson: "Java EE 6 Gets it Right"
JSR 313
Apache votes no on Java EE 6
JEE 6: Extensibility, Profiles and Pruning
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