Chapter 1. Java Platform, Enterprise Edition
Introduction
The Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) provides a standards-based platform for developing web and enterprise applications. These applications are typically designed as multitier applications, with a frontend tier consisting of web frameworks, a middle tier providing security and transactions, and a backend tier providing connectivity to a database or a legacy system. The Java EE platform defines APIs for different components in each tier, and also provides some additional services such as naming, injection, and resource management that span across the platform. Each component is defined in a separate specification that also describes the API, javadocs, and expected behavior.
The Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) was released in December 2009 and provides a simple, easy-to-use, and complete stack for building such applications. The previous version of the platform, Java EE 5, took the first step in providing a simplified developer experience. The Java EE 6 platform further improves upon the developer productivity features and also adds a lot more functionality.
The three main goals of the platform are:
- Ease of use
The Java EE 6 platform takes ease of use to new heights by extensively using convention over configuration and heavy use of annotations on a Plain Old Java Object (POJO). Adding
@Stateless,@Stateful, or@Singletonto a POJO makes it an Enterprise JavaBean. Further, this could be easily packaged ...