Overview of Java EE

The Java EE platform was developed through the Java Community Process (JCP), which is responsible for all Java technologies. JCP has created Java Specification Requests (JSRs) to describe the various proposed Java EE technologies. Typically, these specifications are implemented by the product vendors (the web-server, application-server, or database-system vendor). These vendors compete to implement the Java EE specifications. The Java Community works under the supervision of the JCP program, and JCP helps to ensure the Java technology's standards, stability, and cross-platform compatibility.

Java EE was maintained by Oracle under JCP after it took over Java from Sun Microsystems in 2009. On September 12th, 2017, Oracle Corporation announced that it would submit Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. This Eclipse top-level project was named Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J). On February 26th, 2018, Eclipse Foundation renamed it Jakarta EE.

Java EE (Jakarta EE) is a set of specifications that go beyond the Java Standard Edition (SE), giving us access to distributed computing and web services for enterprise applications. It is designed to create large, distributed, multitiered, secure, transactional, scalable, reliable, and highly-available enterprise applications that are intended to solve critical business problems. The intention of Java EE is to abstract the complex logic for distributed transactional details, leaving the programmer to work on the actual business logic.

Some of the core technologies of the Java Enterprise Edition include the following:

•  Java Servlets
•  JSP
• JDBC
• JavaMail
• RMI
• EJB

Java EE is made up of different frameworks that are used to develop enterprise applications. It provides a simplified programming model to build applications. It has a rapid application development time and is based on a secure and reliable model. It allows us to focus on the business implementation rather than on setting up the system. Let's take a look at some of the benefits of using Java Enterprise Edition as a platform for developing applications:

• Dependency injection: Through dependency injection, all the required resources can be injected into the components, thereby separating the resource-creation logic from the application code. This helps to create loosely-coupled applications that are easy to maintain. Java EE has Contexts and Dependency Injections (CDI) through which the required bean dependencies are injected into the components.
• Configurations: Java EE provides a way to define configurations using annotations. It also allows us to use XML-based configurations. The Server reads all the configurations and binds them to the components during the deployment of the application.

• The Java persistence API: Java EE provides an easy way to manage data layers and has a well-defined ORM framework known as Java Persistence API (JPA). JPA allows us to define entities, mapping them to the database for persistence.

• Support for web services: Through its rich frameworks, the Java EE platform provides a way to develop web services. Using Java EE, we can create SOAP-based web services and from Java EE 6 onward, we can create Restful Web Services as well.

When we combine Java EE with the Kotlin language, we can write concise and clean code, and we can create enterprise applications quickly and easily.