On Monday the final votes for “JSR 316: Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) Specification” have been submitted and with little surprise it has been approved.
JavaEE6 marks a major milestone in enterprise Java with the arrival of subspecs such as CDI, JPA2, EJB 3.1 (with EJB Lite) or Servlet 3.0. But the most important part for me is the new web profile which was really overdue.JavaEE5 left web developers somewhere between all or nothing. POSCs (Plain Old Servlet Containers) proveded not all of the JEE stack that might be needed while full blown application servers like JBoss were too heavy (although JBoss did a< good job with the different profiles).
Integrating different Frameworks into POSCs can be really a pain in the ass. Take JPA for example. JPA in a POSC is nothing more than a JavaSE usage of the JPA. Which means there are no manged transactions no container managed persistence contexts etc. Everything had to be custom made which is not the desired way.
With the new web profile you only get what you really need: Servlets, JPA2, JTA, CDI, EJB Lite which makes web development a lot easier. But not only the developer benefits but also the vendors since they don’t have to implement the full stack.
Hopefully vendors will jump on the JEE6 train and there will be a vibrant market of implementations.
Recent Comments