Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, Third Edition

De Facto Standard Enterprise Development Tools

The Java community members involved in defining the J2EE platform and its supporting standard enterprise APIs would be the first to admit that it was never their intent to create standards for every element of enterprise development. If there were only one right way to do everything, there wouldn’t be much room for creativity (or profit, for that matter). J2EE covers a critical mass of the capabilities needed when building and running enterprise applications. It standardizes those things that are required in order to make enterprise applications portable across application servers and support systems, to allow vendors to integrate their services into the Java environment in a standard way and to prevent enterprise developers from wasting their valuable time re-creating utilities that really should be plumbing, enabling them to focus their efforts on the business logic and user interfaces of their systems.

In addition to the standard Java Enterprise APIs discussed earlier, an enterprise developer typically finds herself turning to a set of other support tools and extension APIs in order to be efficient and effective in building enterprise systems. These tools and APIs fill the gaps left by the standard enterprise Java APIs. Sometimes these gaps are intentional (e.g., “it doesn’t make sense to standardize an API for X”). Other times the gaps are temporary, because a standard hasn’t been defined yet for a particular area.

In the second part ...