The Past, Present and Future of Enterprise Java

The Java Platform Enterprise Edition 7 specification early draft is available for download. All these years the focus was to introduce several APIs and technologies as part of the platform to make it more powerful, simple and complete. This is the first time the focus has shifted in a completely different direction - to bring in something new to the platform, apart from the enhancements to the existing technologies. In this article, we'll look at how Java EE evolved, became a major platform specification and understand the direction in which it is moving forward. A brief look at the history of the Java EE – Java Platform Enterprise Edition specification reveals that every major release of the specification has been driven by a major theme. A look at the specification details reveals that the theme for the first release of the specification J2EE 1.2 was to bring all enterprise specifications like Servlet, JSP, EJB, RMI, IIOP under one umbrella of specifications, the focus was to introduce support for distributed computing systems that reduce cost and complexity. The next release of the specification J2EE 1.3 was merely an enhancement to the J2EE 1.2 specification without any specific theme as such. Connector API, JMS Provider and Container Managed Persistence beans are prominent inclusions.

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